[CHAPTER V]
THE HINDENBURG TUNNEL
On the day following our visit to Peronne we motored out to Bellicourt to see the Hindenburg tunnel, of which rumour and reading tell us so much. This tunnel was built by Hindenburg, we are told, and if ever the British troops crossed the German defences the enemy soldiers would conceal themselves in thousands, come out when our men had passed by, attack them in rear and cut them to pieces. The Hindenburg trenches might be crossed, but the Hindenburg tunnel would be the ruin of the Allies. This and that we were told, for war quickening the ear for rumour we believe much that in days of peace would pass by for idle tales.
The truth of the matter is that this tunnel was not built by Hindenburg but by Louis XVI, at whose expense the work was begun, the cost of the undertaking being about £4,000,000, and through it runs the great canal of Picardy. This canal passing from St. Quentin to Cambrai had to run through a country rising so much that it was necessary to carry it under the earth for a considerable depth, and this canal tunnel in places is hewn entirely from rock chalk. The work was completed by Napoleon I in 1810 and a communication opened thereby between the river Scheldt and the extreme eastern departments of France and the Atlantic through the rivers Somme, Seine and Loire.
At Bellicourt we descended several steps covered with mud and littered with the wreckage of war, strands of barbed wire, rusty rifles, German equipments, ammunition boxes, trench helmets, sandbags, etc., all the odds and ends flung away by the German army in retreat.
Sticking through the arched entrance of the tunnel was the prow of a flat-bottomed barge and built over this was a chamber. In here we made our way, crawling up long, crooked stone stairs steeped in gloom almost impenetrable. We entered an apartment dimly lit by an opening which let in a pale ray of light. The officer conducting our party lit a candle and we could see the room. Under our feet was a floor of boards holed in many places; some of the holes were very large. To come along the floor without a light was impossible, and one false step and a man would drop through the aperture into the canal below. On our left as we entered stood a large wheel which was at one time worked by a hand windlass. This wheel was used in lifting the sluice gates to let the freight barges through.
Further along were two large coppers filled with some thick fluid which exhaled a putrid stench. One of these coppers is now known to history, for rumour has it that when the British soldiers took the place they found a German dead and naked in the boiler, that the soldier had been dissected by a surgeon, that the oven was at that time in use for cooking meat for the German soldiery, etc.
That Germans lived there and made the place their dwelling is true, for even now in apartments leading off from the entrance chamber can be seen many beds bedded with straw and still covered with army blankets. Belts for machine gun bullets litter the floor, and opposite an opening that looks out towards the north-west is to be seen an emplacement on which a machine gun once stood. The fact is that the apartment was used by a machine-gun crew who made the chamber their home, who lived there, sleeping in the place and cooking their food in the copper.
Up above the machine-gun emplacement is to be seen a hole slanting obliquely through the outer wall and coming to an end in the roof of the room. It is now held by some that a shell came through here, dropped in the midst of the gunners, burst and blew one of the men into the copper. Of the remainder a number were killed and two or three wounded. On the wall of the apartment can be seen many holes and dents made by flying fragments.
This is the opinion of some. Others say that soldiers attacked the place, ascended the stairs, bombed the inmates of the keep, killing many, and the force of an exploding bomb blew one into the copper.