With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

I went down one of our mines one night. The proceeding was irregular, I believe, and if I had applied for permission through the official channel I make no doubt that it would have been refused. Incidentally, I was nearly shot on emerging, but that is another story. I was spending the night in our trenches, and in the course of an after-dinner stroll my host, 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 baulks leading straight out in the direction of the German trenches. Guttering candles stuck on the baulks 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 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 sap, 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 shovelling the clay into the trolley. Heavens, how these men worked! Their breath came fast and regular, they spoke not a word; one heard only the hack, hack, of the pick and the dull smack of the earth-clods as they fell into the trolley. There was no overseer there to harry them, no “speeder-up” to drive. They were alone in their sap, working as though life depended on it (as maybe it did). Good for Wigan, wasn’t it?

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—all credit to him for his vigilance!—was easily persuaded to come along to the dug-out and have a drop of grog before turning in.

That night I heard much of mining, its perils and its humours—of mine-shafts blocked by tons of earth dislodged by shells; of thrilling races underground, when the pick of the enemy sapper could be clearly heard and our men had to pile on every ounce of energy to get their sap finished and the mine laid before the German was “through” with his; of hand-to-hand fights with pick and shovel in cramped places in the dark when two saps meet. Through all the yarns appeared, bright as the flares that shone out above the trench-lines while we sat and talked, the young officer’s intense pride in his men, these stout North of England miners “doing their bit” in the bowels of the earth.

One story which made us laugh was the story of the subaltern fresh out from home. He was a keen young officer, as they all are, “smart as paint,” as Long John Silver would say, and full of zeal. One night he came to the dug-out of the sapper officer who was supervising the digging of a mine in this particular section of the line.

“You must get up at once,” he whispered in his ear, in a voice hoarse with excitement; “it is very important. Lose no time.” The sapper had gone to his dug-out worn out after several sleepless nights, and was very loth to sally forth into the cold and frosty air. “It is a mine, a German mine,” said the subaltern fresh out from home; “you can see them working through the glasses.” The sapper was out in a brace of shakes, and hurriedly followed the subaltern along the interminable windings of the trenches. In great excitement the subaltern led him to where a telescope rested on the parapet. “Look!” he said dramatically. The sapper applied his eye to the glass. There was a bright moon, and by its rays he saw, sure enough, figures working feverishly about a shaft. There was something familiar about it, though—then he realized that he was looking down his own mine. The wretched youth who had dragged him from his slumbers had forgotten the windings of the trench. This, and much else, the sapper pointed out with great forcefulness before he went back to resume his broken rest, leaving the young officer pondering over the coarse language of the Royal Engineers!

Vermelles is the best example I have seen of the important rôle that sapping plays in this siege warfare. Indeed, this little village, which the French wrested from the Germans by sapping along and blowing it up house by house, is renowned along the entire front of the Allies as a kind of exhibition model of fighting typical of the war of positions. Vermelles is in the Black Country of the North of France, five miles south-east of Béthune, a pretty little village lying on a small ridge running up from a fertile plain. The French Tenth Army, under General Maud’huy, advancing after the failure of the great German thrust against Arras in October, found their passage barred at Vermelles by the Germans, whose machine-guns, their muzzles thrust out of the cellar openings of the houses, held them up at the very entrance to the village. A French frontal attack from the western approaches to the place failed with heavy loss, and tentative attempts from the flanks to carry the village by assault were fruitless. Every house was a German stronghold, bristling with machine-guns, defended by deep trenches, and linked up by telephone with the poste de commandement, which was installed in the cellars of the Château of Vermelles under the front steps.

“Daily Mail” phot.
A BURSTING MINE.