Even this colossal figure was surpassed by the expenditure of high-explosive shells by the German and Austrian armies in their successful thrust against Przemysl. Our bombardment of Neuve Chapelle was, in the main, effective, though barbed-wire entanglements in front of part of the German trenches were not cut, and heavy casualties were thus caused to the infantry when they advanced.
For the most part, however, we found the German trenches obliterated, the little village a smoking heap of ruins, and those Germans who survived, dazed and frightened, amid piles of torn corpses. If this enormous concentration of guns was required to blast a path of 1,400 yards with a thirty-five-minute bombardment, what a gigantic concentration of artillery, what a colossal expenditure of ammunition, will be required to drive a wedge several miles deep through positions which the Germans have spent three seasons in strengthening and consolidating!
IV—IN THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH
I went down one of our mines one night. I was spending the night in our trenches and the captain in command of this particular section asked me if I would care to see "our mine." Considerations of the censorship impel me to abridge what follows up to the moment when I found myself in a square, greasy gallery, with clay walls propped up by timber balks leading straight out in the direction of the German trenches. Guttering candles stuck on the balks at intervals faintly lit up as strange a scene as I have witnessed in this war.
Deep in the bowels of the earth a thick, square-set man in khaki trousers and trench boots, a ragged vest displaying a tremendous torso all glistening with sweat, was tipping clay out of a trolley and gently chaffing in a quite unprintable English of the region of Lancashire a hoarse but invisible person somewhere down the shaft.
I crawled round the quizzer, slipping on the greasy planks awash with muddy water on the floor of the gallery, and found myself confronted by another of the troglodytes, a man who was so coated with clay that he appeared to be dyed khaki (like the horses of the Scots Greys) from top to toe. I asked him whence he came, so different was he, in speech and appearance, from the black-haired, low-browed Irishmen watching at the parapet of the trench far above us. "A coom fra' Wigan!" he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a grimy hand, and, thus saying, he turned round and made off swiftly, bent double as he was, down the low gallery.
I followed, the water swishing ankle-deep round my field boots. The air was dank and foul; the stooping position became almost unbearable after a few paces; one slipped and slithered at every step.
At intervals side-galleries ran out from the main gap, unlit, dark and forbidding—listening posts. After a hundred paces or so a trolley blocked the way. Behind it two men were working, my taciturn acquaintance and another. The latter was hacking at the virgin earth with a pick; the former was shoveling the clay into the trolley.
I had not been out of that mine for more than a minute when an electric lamp flashed in my eyes, and an excitable young man, who held an automatic pistol uncomfortably near my person, accosted me thus: "I beg your pardon, sir"—it occurred to me that the pistol accorded ill with this polite form of address—"but may I ask what you were doing down my mine?" My friend, the Captain, rushed forward with an explanation and an introduction, the pistol was put away, and the sapper subaltern was easily persuaded to come along to the dugout and have a drop of grog before turning in.