Mines are dug by hand or electric drills. The latter have the disadvantage of making too much noise. Greatly improved systems of “listening posts” permit the enemy’s operations to be detected and opposed, and in all cases, excepting at Messines, where the British bored their galleries at more than fifty metres underground, mine-digging was carried on under great difficulties.
The best means to neutralize the danger of a mine whose construction is discovered, is to reach it as quickly as possible by excavating a “counter-mine,” and blow it up before the enemy has a chance to set it off. The success of such a counter-mine is termed a camouflet inflicted on the enemy.
In our opinion, mines and counter-mines will play a less and less important part in the present war, but it will nevertheless be necessary for our armies to be provided with the means of operating them whenever the Command may deem them advisable.
4. Special railway troops.—Transportation by roads. Since the beginning of the war, France has been lacking in special technical corps, especially for the railways. Her ante-bellum system was insufficient to cope with the rapid development of the military operations, and the reorganization rendered necessary by trench warfare along an extensive front.
A large proportion of the railroad employees was at first mobilized to assist and reinforce the railway troops. Then, after a few months, a large number of these men had to be sent back to their former civilian duties, in order to assure the economical life of the country.
While the transport of troops alone requires a daily extension of our road and railway systems, and constant attention to repair-work in the fighting zones, the industrial efforts of the nation to equip and arm the millions of combatants also necessitates an enormous railroad activity. As the lack of workmen prevents locomotives and carriages from being repaired, and the supply of rolling-stock shipped from America is not sufficient, it is as much as the French can do to keep their railroad tracks in good condition.
It should be noted that owing to the intense and forced use of her interior lines to which we have already referred, the railways of Germany are in still worse condition than those of France. For want of oil and grease a large portion of their rolling-stock cannot be used.
To make up the deficiency in technical troops, France has had to have recourse to her “territorial units,” composed of men unfit for the Front and generally more than forty-five years old, who, exhausted by three years of war, are unable to do much work.
This short résumé of the conditions prevailing on the rear of the French Front will enable the Americans to comprehend the necessity for organizing on a very extensive scale a special railroad transportation corps. Without interfering with traffic on the principal roads of the United States, it should be possible to create railway regiments officered by civil engineers, with separate units for track-construction, operation of trains, and repair of rolling-stock.
The engineer regiments should likewise be enabled to build rapidly field-barracks of all kinds in the zones devastated and abandoned by the Germans.