The next day one of the infantry officers on our front who was scheduled to lead an attack "over the top" got started through some miscalculation five minutes before the appointed zero hour. The whole of his party ran into our own barrage and were nearly all blotted out. The same officer survived—but reached a dressing-station near us quite out of his mind.
Up the road a short distance from our camp was an infantry company officers' dugout, with another near them occupied by their orderlies. One night in May a Boche eight-inch shell burst on top of the orderlies' dugout and buried them completely. Unfortunately, the fact was not discovered until daylight, and when the entrance was cleaned out again the men had been dead for some time. So many were buried by shell explosions in this way that all dugouts are now constructed with two or more entrances.
CHAPTER XII
THE HINDENBURG LINE
On May 20 we engineered a most successful underground operation, and very materially aided our infantry in capturing another 500 yards of the famous Hindenburg line. In order to understand the situation more clearly, I will endeavor to explain briefly the construction of these Hindenburg-line trenches. They had undoubtedly been constructed during the months previous to the German retreat and were cleverly planned and executed. It was apparent that the enemy had intended to retreat to them and to hold them at any cost, and their subsequent capture by the British must have occasioned the Boche General Staff considerable surprise and pain. It was evident that the Germans last year, instead of constructing armored tanks to oppose ours, had decided to build large, deep trenches which they hoped would prove in most cases an insurmountable obstacle to the British tanks. The tanks could not normally cross a very wide trench, but the terrific artillery bombardment of the British succeeded in levelling off the trenches so that a tank commander by careful observation would be able to spot places at intervals over which he could waddle his machine. The usual three lines—reserve, support, and front—had been built, very heavy, wide, and dense barbed-wire obstacles separating them. All of these trenches were approximately twelve to fourteen feet deep and fourteen feet wide at the top. Opening from the sides at about fifty yards' intervals were dugout entrances built at an angle of forty-five degrees to the surface.
These entrances all opened out at the bottom into a uniform gallery six feet by four in size. The galleries ran underground for miles; one could go down an entrance in one village and come up again ten or more miles away in another. Everywhere there was an overhead cover of hard chalk and clay of from thirty to forty feet. As happens in nearly all of the Boche underground work, the tunnels and dugouts were all built of four-inch oak case sets, closely timbered throughout. On both sides of the tunnel at frequent intervals small chambers were cut out for the use of officers, non-coms., and cooks. In the main galleries the sides were lined with double bunks, in size six feet by two, made roughly of two-by-four lumber with chicken wire nailed across for the men to sleep on.
As these bunks took up about two feet of the four-foot width of gallery, it must have made it very difficult for the stretcher-bearers to move the wounded out. The enemy incidentally had very accurate surveys of these trenches and could always be relied on to place their shells squarely on or in these captured trenches.
Their former German garrisons had done themselves very well, and many evidences of comfort were found which are absent from our own trenches.
View from rear of a typical German reinforced concrete machine-gun emplacement. Taken on the Hindenburg line south of Arras.
Although the trench itself was blown to pieces by British artillery fire and the machine-gun crew either killed or captured, no harm was done to the concrete emplacement.