We get frightfully muddy working in the saps but when we do get out we can get a bath for a Franco (French Franc) and can have most of our clothes washed. Even with a bath once or twice a week the daily Louse hunt remains on the programme. Filthy little blighters.
Life here is not all bad news though, the company continues to have tobacco, cigarettes and matches issued about once a week and rum every other day if we want it.
I see Martin Lamb almost every day, he’s only two bays along from me in the dugout. He told me about another mate of ours from Beech Forest, George Close, who was seriously wounded recently. Martin looks as well as anyone else who is still standing upright around here. We are always exchanging stories from back home and share a few laughs. He’s a nice fellow.
There is a bit of irony in being called the “first replacements” into the 2ATC. The mob I’m with arrived in France the same day 2ATC left Sydney. It’s pretty hot that the replacements were over here long before the originals arrived. We are, however, honoured to have had our new patches presented to us. The 2ATC ones are purple with the letter “T” in the middle. The purpose of the patch is for easy identification if someone requires knowing what section or division you are with at a glance. I remove the 1st Pioneer patches and store them, then with a little time and patience, sew on the new ones.
One evening, a mate and I (being off duty) went to a picture show in a small village, three miles back behind the trenches. It was the first show I’ve seen in France and it was “tres bon” (very good). A bottle of the local red plonk after and we discovered we could speak French fluently, (only joking).
My mail from home keeps being drip fed to me. I’m sure there will be some delays because of the change of address from 1st Pioneers to 2nd Tunnelling but eventually it will turn up. I receive a letter that Wal had written to me when I was in Castlemaine camp. How long ago was that; eleven, twelve months ago? Must have sailed three times around the world before finding me here!
Because most of the letters I write are written in the trench or dugout, they get covered in candle grease and French mud. That’s a gift from me to the recipient.
I manage a decent stint working deep underground. It’s a whole new world down there. No war noises like shells going off or machine gun fire rattling away in your ear. Peaceful, tranquil, and dark. Very, very dark. To get below the water table the tunnels need to be mined very deep, it is not uncommon to be twenty to thirty yards below the surface of no-man’s land.
A couple of times I have deliberately put the candle out to feel the sensation of total blackness with my eyes wide open. Nothing, just absolute black. No grey or filtered light that you get when your eyes adjust to darkness on the surface. The sensation of a total blackout must be the closest thing resembling death. You can hold your hand an inch off your nose, but you cannot be sure it’s actually there, you deliberately listen for your own breathing and heart rate as a check that you are still alive.
Then after a while I fumble for the matches and relight the candle.
I don’t mind being in the tunnels when the air is good but sometimes I’ve been down there when a candle would not burn. We can be a couple of hundred yards from the surface, the conditions are dry, cramped and very dusty. The portal (entrance) might have the entrance blocked or restricted and there is absolutely no air flow. It’s not unusual to come out at the end of a shift with a screaming headache which I attribute to the poor air.
Now I’m a “Listener”.
We have an apparatus specifically designed to listen for the enemy when engaged in tunnelling. One end is placed against the wall or crown of the tunnel and a hearing device that clips over your ears. Similar to a doctor’s stethoscope, just a bit heavier duty. My role is to try and pick up any sounds that might be coming from German tunnellers working nearby.
The German tunnels could be anywhere, and you can be sure they are looking and listening for us also. I often pick up sounds that resemble metal clanging as if shovels were hitting each other and scrapping noises that I suspect is earth being shovelled up. With practice, it’s possible to pinpoint the direction that sound is coming from. This information is passed on to our runners who take it to the surface to be analysed.
It’s very important that we work our tunnels as quietly as possible. No talking, and the miners extract the clay in a very slow and precise manner. The loose material is sandbagged and taken to the surface. Most of these forward tunnels are very tight, around three feet high and not much wider than a big man’s shoulders. It’s a big squeeze to get past another tunneller or you both need to back out to an area where the tunnel has been widened. When removing waste material, you drag the bag backwards to the next man in the line then leap frog over it, so he can move it backwards and so on. The empty bags get passed back into the tunnel in the same manner. Some of the larger tunnels use small rail carts but I haven’t been into a tunnel that big yet.
On one shift, I was at my listening post, thirty yards from the miners who were working the face of the tunnel. Another listener crawled up to me and whispered in my ear that he could hear voices next to his position. I move up where he had been working and using hand signals, he directed me to listen in. It came as a devil of a shock to hear another language being spoken somewhere on the other side of the clay wall. It was faint, but clear and obvious enough to report immediately. Fritz could only be a foot of blue clay away.
The miners at the face and a few others working in adjoining saps received a tap on the shoulder and we all return to the surface.
Our information was checked on a map and a decision made to collapse our tunnel around this area as soon as possible. Square tins, previously used to carry oil, now full of explosives are relayed down from the surface and stacked against the tunnel wall, nearly half a ton in total goes down. The miners wire them up, still all working in absolute silence, and run the firing wires back up the tunnel. A bulkhead made up of sand bags was built in front of the explosives with a lot of care taken not to damage the firing wires. The mining term for this type of subsurface explosion is “Camouflet”.
We believe that Fritz was due to have a shift change in their trenches and tunnels after dark and again around daybreak (same as us). If the timing is right, it is hoped to inflict double the number of casualties. Our tunnel was cleared, a final check of the firing line made and at zero hour someone on the surface pushed the plunger. There was a substantial rumbling under our feet and the soldier staffing our trench periscope spotted a cloud of dust and smoke rise from an area of Fritz trench line a hundred and fifty yards away.
Thirty minutes later there is another rumbling, the Germans retaliated and fired a camouflet of their own (or they have had an accidental misfire), but it was a wasted effort on their behalf, we didn’t have any men down our tunnel.
A couple of hours later our tunnellers went down to survey the damage and report back that there was nothing to see. Our tunnel had indeed collapsed, and the assumption is that we took out a section of theirs as well.
The biggest satisfaction I get from this is that we got them before they got us. It is a bit frustrating however, to spend two weeks working down there just to blow it up by our own hand.
The war being fought underground can be just as stressful as the one above. A mine collapse or Fritz firing a camouflet on us is the constant threat that we live with. The consolation of working as a tunneller though, is that if we are doomed to go up by a mine explosion we are killed and buried at the same time. That must be a better ending than rotting in no-man’s land for weeks on end with the maggots eating your eyes out.
My mate, (the one standing up in the photo of the three of us), was wounded by a mine explosion last week and is now recuperating in hospital in England. The other fellow in the same photo and I were working our sap, both as listeners. If the explosion had been a few minutes later, all the men in our sap would have been up for breakfast and we two listeners would have been on the very spot. As it was, a couple of our
chaps got killed and the one wounded while we got the shaking.
Our artillery has been plonking them into Fritz a treat lately and strange to say, he has not retaliated on this sector of trenches so much. He did manage to get a few over the back though, the supports and the town two mile back copped it badly.
Any churches that are within range of his guns are smashed to atoms and these churches in France are truly magnificent structures. The artwork and décor on the insides are stunning. I’ve been in a few that were only slightly damaged, and they are all such beautiful pieces of architecture. I am unsure why Fritz places so much importance on destroying the historical buildings and churches. Maybe he believes troops are resting in them or they are being used as Battalion headquarters. He is certainly fixated on taking out the centre piece of any town or village.
All the local people are Roman Catholics and they take enormous pride in having a decent church or cathedral in every town. It continues to fascinate me that most of these structures would have been built hundreds of years before Australia was ever sighted. Such a tragedy to see them damaged or destroyed.
The local cemeteries are also very grand, most gravesites have wreaths in glass cases attached to the headstones. Some of the dates recorded on them are two hundred years old. The care and attention to detail is a wonderful sight, so much respect for the memory of departed loved ones.
Word gets back to me that two more Beech Forest boys have been killed recently. Vic Quinn and Ben Rawle. Both were a year older than me and we knew each other well. We were all at school together as young fellas. Poor old Beech Forest is paying a terrible price with the men they have lost lately. Everyone at home would be beside themselves sharing this grief. Such a terrible waste. Those boys will be truly missed.
I have no idea where they have been buried.
A letter from my parents spells out just how tough life back in Beech Forest really is at present. When war broke out in 1914, Beech Forest had a population just short of two hundred and fifty inhabitants. Since then, around one hundred of our youngest, strongest, farm hands, labourers, carpenters, and stockmen have enlisted into the AIF. This has had a terrible impact on the tiny farming community, there is no one left there to do any work. The annual Potato Show has been cancelled, along with all the cricket and football matches.
So, apart from having so many men committed to the war, plus the burden of the poor beggars who have lost their lives, the town is at a standstill. It’s impossible to hire men to attend to stock or pastures as there simply isn’t anyone available. Families are walking off their farms and moving away to Colac and Melbourne just to survive. Dad explains all this to me with a hint that Cloverdale is under some pressure also. While Mum and Dad still have two other sons, they made the decision years ago, when Frank blew his hand off, that a good education was the future for my siblings. It was not intended that either of them would finish up as farmers.
Walter has been in South Melbourne for a year or so now serving an internship with the PMG (Post Master General) and just biding his time till he is old enough to enlist anyway. Frank’s missing hand has never held him back, he’s a battler and a darn good one but his direction in life will be clerical, maybe a school teacher or such.
I understand the problem, but I don’t have many solutions to offer up. The only idea I could put forward is that the war stops now and we all go home. But that won’t be my call to make. The stress and heartache must be the same in every small town across Australia.
My twenty-first birthday, Friday 25th August 1916 is spent in a writing rack (dug out) writing home to my family and a few close friends. I don’t share the day with anyone here, it’s not the type of milestone that anyone is interested in with a war going on over our heads. The more important dates to remember here are the ones when someone you know gets knocked over. I’m sure Mum & Dad will make a toast to me over the kitchen table at Cloverdale tonight. I bet I get a letter from mum with today’s date on it. For sure.
We will get a day off soon and the plan is to catch a motor transport out to a town about seven or eight miles back. Sadly, the towns in closer have now all been flattened. I’m in serious need of a decent blow out (meal) but it’s pretty dear. A serve of eggs, chips, steak, and tomatoes will set one back about five Francs. I don’t like rum and usually give my rations away to the other boys but when we get into town I might have a bottle of the local French wine as a birthday present to myself. The local wine is a very enjoyable drop, and cheap. I’ll smuggle a bottle back for a top-up later.
The war does not seem to be getting much nearer the end by my reckoning. Any thought of being home by Christmas is just a dream. Even if the war finished today it would take six months to pack up and get everyone on ships homeward bound, I cannot see it happening. There isn’t much speculation by the chaps around here about it ending, the daily fight is just too intense for someone to put the flag up and stop the war. Waste of time even thinking about it to be honest.
Fritz keeps sending his artillery over, shells in the day, bullets in the night which keeps us “Duckboard Harriers” on the move. They call us Harriers because we are running up and down the wooden duckboards on the trench floor all day and night. The common joke is that we do not need a starting gun to get us moving. When the shells begin to lob in close we’re off!
The Germans constantly banging away at our aeroplanes is a regular daytime affair around this sector, especially if the weather is reasonable. He waits till our planes are over our trenches and then lets his aircraft batteries go. We hear the shells go whistling up and then see the black smoke of the shell burst. A second later comes the explosion which is deafening, especially if they are not such a great distance up. We then get to deal with the shrapnel, I have had any amount of it fall around me and I certainly don’t welcome it getting any nearer. Of course, we have our steel helmets on which can ward off a piece if your luck is in. Not such a good result if a piece hits dead centre though.
The shrapnel is one of the worse items to contend with. The other day a few of us were out behind the parados when without warning, Fritz put a few over our heads. I can tell you there was a big dive for the dugout, head first over the top of the trench. It beats me how we all escaped without a scratch.
Work around the Armentieres front is continually hindered by heavy bombardments and gas attacks. We can hardly get anything achieved when we are holed up in deep dugouts seeking shelter for days on end or standing to, defending our territory.
Several times our trenches have been breached by Fritz raids, sometimes by just a handful of men, almost as if it was a spur of the moment decision to come and have a look at what we are up too. Other times, dozens have come over the top. I am pleased to say that all have been repelled but there are many dead on both sides. No-man’s land is a stinking, rotting, maggot ridden pit. Putrid.
A communication trench and the shaft entrance it led to where a few of us were held up was bombed into oblivion by Fritz this morning. We took the rumblings and a bit of percussion down the tunnel but got through without any injuries. Three of our men who were at the entrance were killed.
It comes as some relief when the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company arrive to relieve us on this sector. A few handshakes and, “It’s all yours boy’s, we’re out of here”. We wave goodbye to eleven o’clock square. (The nickname we gave to the Armentieres town square. The town’s tower clock had been stuck on eleven o’clock since it took a shell strike a couple of years back).
2ATC are pulled out and transferred about ten-mile south east to Cordonnerie. No chance of an easier life, this sector is just as active as where we just left. I do a few shifts working on a tunnel entrance and gallery. The work is slowed when we encounter a lot of rock and large stones which we haven’t come across before. The ground conditions are usually mud, caused by rainfall or the water table, or blue clay is the most common. A lot more timber supports and tunnel sets (frames) are required to hold the ground tight and stop loose rock
caving in.
The German tunnellers are very active and we are firing camouflets on them almost daily. There have been a couple of instances where they have broken through into our tunnels or us into theirs. I’ve not been around when this has happened and hope not to be. Close quarter fighting in a pitch black three-foot-high tunnel would be a horrific experience; not everyone is going to walk out.
Leave is being granted to England at present but there is a pecking order in place as to who goes. As you would expect, all the Gallipoli ANZAC men will go first, then some sort of rotation to enable the rest of us a crack at it. Because this front is so active with Australians it might take a while to work everyone in and out. There is a chap who has his bunk next to mine, came away with the original 5th Battalion and spent time in Gallipoli. So, it’s time he got a spell.
The other day there was thunder, lighting, and rain, it was as if the guns and thunder were roaring for supremacy. I didn’t know who to give the verdict to, but I know which one I prefer! It is all right being on the business end of the guns but as often as not we are also on the other end of it. Usually it is a case of take what we give.
I was one of a dozen lucky men picked out to go to tunnel listening school. We had to walk back a couple of miles one morning, then caught a motor transport for a fifty mile or thereabouts trip way up into Belgium. It was a fine day for a change and was a bonzer trip. All the way up I could see that the Cockies have their crops stacked, so I suppose there would be some French or Belgium swearing at the recent rains. But if you live in these parts you would be alert to the amount of rain that comes in.
The best sight of all was the growing hop vines, they have them twining up poles and wire to a height of fifteen feet or more. It is all green and looks very decent indeed. We saw any quantity of Belgium countryside, beautiful roaming hills, some areas of light forest and a clear blue-sky backdrop. Quite a contrast to the war-ravaged landscape a few miles to the east.
Walk a War in My Shoes Page 9