At dusk it was time to shoulder your load and be on the move. The relieving troops went out through the Menin Gate, marched for a mile over the broken shell-pocked pave, then struck out north-east to Hooge Ridge, or south-east towards Zillebeke. They slipped and slithered along the wooden tracks that wound across the swamp, heads hunched like turtles between their shoulders as if the weight of rifle, bandolier and knapsack would shield them from flying shrapnel and the fountains of mud and slush thrown up by the explosions. The lucky ones got a ‘Blighty’ – a neat, sharp blow that fractured the shin-bone and stamped your ticket for home. The unlucky few were hit and slipped unnoticed into the mud. Most struggled on until they arrived sodden, filth-encrusted and weary at the dubious shelter of the watery ditch where, come what may, they must stick it out as best they could until the next company of mud-soaked men struggled up the broken track to relieve them. Nerves were taut. Tempers were frayed. But even displays of temper could lead to a nervous laugh.
Corporal T. Newell, No. 102096, 171 Tunnelling Coy., Royal Engineers
It was the rule for the man in the lead to pass back to the man behind him word of any obstruction, like a hole in the duckboard. Word was passed back, ‘Mind the hole’, and everybody muttered it over his shoulder to the man behind. And then the man behind Corporal Leake stepped slap into a hole in the duckboard into a foot of watery clay. Leaky turned round to help him out with the bloke cussing and swearing. Leaky, in his broad Yorkshire, whispered, ‘I said mind t’ole.’ The bloke said, ‘t’ole be buggered. It was a bloody great ‘ole’.
For men like these of the Royal Engineers, the ordeal of the night was, at the same time, better and worse, for they made up the working parties.Their night would be spent in gruelling sweating labour, often out in front of the line strengthening the trench, replacing barbed wire in front of it; and should a nervous hand inadvertently let go one end of the taut metal it rushed back to spring on to the roll with a ping that seemed to reverberate for miles. Then the heartstopping flares would go up from Jerry across the way, and resisting the fatal temptation to fling yourself to the ground you froze like a statue in its unearthly glare, hoping to be mistaken for the indeterminate outline of a shattered tree.
Private W. G. Bell, No. 4640, gth Btn., Army Cyclist Corps
If Jerry got the idea that there was a working party out in front – and it didn’t take him long to get the idea because he could hear the shovels hitting stones, you know, and fellows swearing and when the Very lights go up you see silhouettes of fellows moving about on the surface – he’d put down a creeping barrage of shells, coming nearer and nearer all the time. It was a wonder anything lived. I was only in one, but, my God, when you heard them coming nearer and nearer you thought the next one was coming to drop right on you. Oh! It was frightening, though. Very frightening! And then he’d traverse the field with machine-gun fire. He’d start at one corner and come right across the field from side to side. Searching.
You’d be lying on the surface. Any dent in the ground you’d stick your head down as far as you could ram it. There might be a shell-hole, there might not, but you had to lay flat on the ground when these creeping barrages came and they were terrible things. You don’t think you’re coming out of it. There’s the blast of them, you know, and you can hear the steel, awful sound, piece of steel as it goes by you. It would cut you in half, a piece of that shell. He’d search out a working party out in the front. He’d know. You couldn’t disguise the fact that the men were out there working. Some of them would even take to smoking. Now that was a stupid thing to do. I’ve known fellows get down in the shell-hole for a spit and a drag as they used to term it – right out there in the advance position, right out in No Man’s Land, you know. Tried to light a match and have a smoke. Some fellows would do that – anything for a smoke. You can’t imagine it – every night, every night, every night. You wonder whether you’ll ever see the next day. You could hear the guns go boomph and then sssssssboomph. Sssssssboomph. They were getting nearer. They’d swamp the sky with Very lights and you’d see the white smoke from the blast – explosions going up. It was all haze like a London fog, only white, under the light of Very lights, and these shells coming over and the bloomin’ guns keep on going boomph, boomph, and over came the shell. You’re petrified. You couldn’t get up and run – what’s the good of running? You might run into it. You’ve only got to lay there and hope that the next one’s going over farther back.
I’ll never forget the experience of a creeping barrage. We were out night after night in different fields, different positions. We wouldn’t know where it was. We had no instructions. You’d find yourself somewhere just getting dusk and you didn’t know where you were. No Man’s Land. There was no buildings, there was open country, a few hedges, perhaps a few stumps of trees. That was it. You didn’t know where on earth you were. You didn’t care, anyway.
A salient, says the dictionary, is a piece of land pushed forward into hostile territory so that the enemy is ranged around it on three sides. Few of the soldiers carried dictionaries. They merely knew that a salient was a place where you got shot. In the front. From either side. And also in the back.
The enemy guns had a perfect field of fire from their concealed positions on the shoulder of high ground which ran south of Ypres – from Hill 60 at Zillebeke through Wytschaete to Messines. Turned inwards towards the salient they could shoot right across it; more unnervingly, they could shoot up it from the rear so that you never knew from which direction a shell would come. There was no escape. Not even for the armourers and orderlies, the cooks, the quartermasters, the clerks and telephonists, whose jobs seldom took them far from the supporting base camps in the back areas of the salient. From Messines Ridge the guns could just as easily drop shells into Poperinghe, ten miles to the rear of Ypres, as they could drop them into Potijze a thousand yards in front of it.
Unless the Germans could be removed from that Ridge, there was no possibility of the Allies ever being able to advance. To withdraw was out of the question. So, decided General Plumer, if the Germans could not be thrown off the Ridge by conventional methods of attack, then the Ridge itself must be blown sky-high – and the enemy with it.
Chapter 3
The plans were laid meticulously and far in advance. Early in the new year of 1916, in full view of the enemy a few hundred yards away on the high ground, the engineers started to dig. They sunk mineshafb behind such camouflage as there was – in the yard of a shattered farm in front of Messines; under the hummock of bricks that marked a ruined cottage in front of Spanbroekmolen; but in most places, as at Hill 60, the tunnel descended at an angle from a sandbagged emplacement inside a well-dug and reinforced trench, a little way behind the front line. The men of the Durhams who worked in the trench, homesick for the streets of Gates-head, christened it Bensham Avenue.
At twenty-four, Martin Greener was a veteran. In the middle of 1915, as a subaltern with the 9th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, he had been given the responsibility of forming a mining section.
Captain M. Greener, 175 Tunnelling Coy., Royal Engineers
I was chosen because I came from a mining family. We picked a lot of Durham pitmen out of the infantry and that was how we began. The Germans were blowing our trenches with very shallow mines and the powers-that-be said, ‘Now look, we must stop this and you must start to countermine.’ Which we did. In the Ypres salient we were certainly the first to do it and that went on for quite a long time. Then the tunnelling companies were formed and I was seconded from the Durhams to the Royal Engineers, to 175 Tunnelling Company, and put in charge of number 4 section. That’s when we started on the deep mining. The big stuff.
The big stuff required the help of real experts to carry it out, and Tom Newell was certainly an expert. In the midst of his infantry training with the Worcestershire Regiment he was surprised to be given a travel warrant from Wareham in Dorset, orders to report to the Royal Engineers’ depot at Chatham, and no other instruct
ions whatever.
Corporal T. Newell, No. 12096, 171 Tunnelling Coy., Royal Engineers
When I got to the depot I was told to go to a certain barrack room and await orders. Gradually, twenty or so other men from various regiments drifted in, everyone wondering why we were there. It wasn’t until a pal of mine arrived, a chap who’d been in the same Rescue Brigade as myself before the war, that it turned out that we were all miners and members of Mine Rescue Brigades from pits all over the country.
The next day we were kitted out for overseas duty and officially transferred to the Royal Engineers. We at least were already in the army, but we were sent to join a group of eighty men who’d come straight out of the mines. They were all kinds, lads of twenty, men of sixty with no army training at all, but they were issued with rifles and ammunition, whether or not they knew how to fire them, and two days later we were in France. It must have been hard on some of the old boys, for we had to march all the way from Steenwerck, through Bailleul, on through Neuve Eglise to Vlamertinghe Farm. When we did get there, we were handed strips of green canvas and stakes and told to make our own bivouacs in the fields – this, mind you, just about three miles from the front line and shells whizzing around a lot too close for comfort. There we joined up with some Welsh miners who’d been transferred from the Monmouthshire Regiment, and together we formed the 171 Tunnelling Company, Royal Engineers.
The tunnelling companies were the elite. The civilians, who had been hurriedly drafted in from the coal-mines or from construction work in the sewers, were paid the princely sum of six shillings a day – a sore point with their workmates who, having been already in the army, continued to draw the standard Tommy’s pay of one humble shilling. The risks and the danger were the same for all.
First the shafts had to be dug through the heavy brown clay, lower still through a stratum of water and sand, and deep into the blue clay which was the core of the salient. These shafts were to be deeper, the tunnels longer and the mines bigger than ever before.
The sections were divided into shifts of eight men, four to work at the face digging cut the clay with broad-bladed picks, stopping every foot or so to shore the mud walls and roof with timber supports – four foot six inches high, two foot nine inches wide. Behind them in this confined space, other men filled sandbags with the hard blue clay, toting them to the shaft bottom to be winched up to the surface.
Captain M. Greener, 175 Tunnelling Coy., Royal Engineers
You’d shift thirty or forty sandbags in a shift, or more, and you couldn’t dispose of the dirt during the daytime. It had to come out at night. You had to be very careful about the disposal of the dirt if you were mining in blue clay, because the stratum of blue clay was deep down, far below the level of the ordinary trenches. If you collected a pile of sandbags with blue clay you had to get rid of it quickly, because the Germans would shell it just to see what was in it. You had to take it out and distribute it as best you could at night, behind the trenches, well away from the line, so that the trenches didn’t look any different. That was the great thing. And that was the big problem, the disposal of the dirt from the mine. But we had carrying parties from the infantry. We were always using the infantry…. It was no wonder they called them the PBI!
Lance-Corporal John Wilson wasn’t a miner but he was in the Durhams, and for a long time in 1916 the Durhams were holding the line at Hill 60.
Lance-CorporalJ. Wilson, No. 52764, 12th Btn., Durham Light Infantry
In and out. In and out. It was a hot spot all right. Jerry knew there was something going on there and he never left us alone. We got a lot of Minenwerfers around there. ‘Minnies’ we called them. They made a great bang and they turned over and over as they came. We feared those more than we feared heavy artillery shells. I was in D company. We’d do forty-eight hours in the line and then we went into the billets, into support. The billets were in tunnels too. Larchwood saps, they called them. It was an overgrown dump of earth that had been lying there since they’d excavated the railway cutting that ran straight up through our trenches to the German line, and the REs had made these dug-outs in it for the miners and the troops in the line. It was only yards behind, but you felt a bit safer in there. There were two rows of beds – just timber frames with wire-netting across them, but you could lie down on them and put your overcoat on top of you and your haversack for a pillow. There was a passage in between with duckboards laid along it, for it was always swimming in water. They weren’t exactly billets. Just sleeping bases for the people who were in support immediately behind the front line ready to be called upon. That’s when we’d be put on these working parties to help the REs. We carried the sandbags in empty and we carried them out full. And we had to carry them some distance! You had to get them well away, far back from the line. Sweating like pigs, working all night in among the shelling and then back to the tunnel before daylight or, if you were unlucky, into the trenches, with the bullets flying all round you.
Below and beyond the trenches, deep under the earth, twenty-one tunnels were being slowly driven forward towards the Germans on the ridge. Down there it was quiet in the dripping gloom. The men worked silently and spoke in whispers. As the tunnels gradually lengthened, they piled the sandbags of excavated clay on to bogies with rubber wheels, which could be silently slid back to the shaft along wooden rails. Only the breath of a murmured remark, the dull scraping away at the clay, the drip of water, the faint hum 6f the dynamo that powered the pumps, the fans and the dim electric lamps, disturbed the silence. All the time the men were listening. For the Germans were tunnelling too, honeycombing the earth with passages that splayed out from a central gallery in a dozen directions, searching for the British runnels they knew full well must be there. When suspicious noises were heard, if the officer in charge of the section did not happen to be in the tunnel, it was the sergeant’s job to go and fetch him. The sergeant in charge of Captain Greener’s No. 4 section was a miner called Deeming.
Captain M. Greener, 175 Tunnelling Coy., Royal Engineers
He came from Backworth in Northumberland and he was a splendid man. Always on the go. Nothing seemed to worry him and you could always depend on him. He came to me and said, ‘I think you’d better come in and listen.’ So we went down the shaft. By that time we had some decent listening apparatus. We had what they called geophones. It was a little round ball about three inches across and you put that against the clay, and you had a tube coming from that with two earpieces, and you listened. If you heard anything, especially at night, you could be pretty sure that there was someone coming from the other direction, countermining. That time we did have a bit of trouble; it was just after we started it, early in 1916. We were down to seventy feet and it was unusual for the Germans to mine as deep as that, but we were certain they were there. It was a very anxious job, because you never knew what was going to happen. Quite a few of our tunnels had been blown in by the Germans and, of course, if you happened to be out in the tunnel beyond that blow, you’d had it. No way of getting out.
When we heard them tunnelling towards us the only thing to do was to get in first and blow them up. We did this with a small mine we called a camouflet. It would be about five hundredweight of explosive and we set it and tamped it with sandbags so that it would explode in the direction where we guessed the Germans were, hoping to blow their tunnel up. We cleared the men out of our own tunnel and set it off. Perhaps we got the Germans. It was hard to tell. But the trouble was it made a terrible mess of our own workings. We had to clean the whole thing out and almost start again.
It was nerve-racking, and exceedingly hard too, for the work went on twenty-four hours a day. We split the sections into groups and worked eight hours on, sixteen hours off. When the men came off a shift they were given a rum ration, and it was the officer’s job to see that the man drank his rum and didn’t hoard it, because the pitmen had a habit of doing that. Well, one particular man had evidently been able to do it and he got blind-drunk. Running through our p
ositions and on through the German positions a hundred yards further on was the old railway line. We called it The Cut and the bottom of it was just a mass of mud, corpses, everything you could think of. Heaven knows how he managed it but this chap fell right down into The Cut. He was making a frantic noise, roaring like a bull and staggering all over the place, but the odd thing was that not a shot was fired, even though it was daylight and in full view of the Germans. We had to get ropes and haul him up, and not a soul was shot at. The Germans didn’t bother. I think they were enjoying the fun. We were rather less amused. But there was no fuss made. The man wasn’t charged or anything. For one thing he was a really good worker and in that sort of situation, doing that sort of ghastly job, you had a much closer contact between the men and the officers. You got to know them well. You were all concerned with getting the job done. You turned a blind eye to a lot of things. They were all characters these Durham pitmen.
Four days in the tunnels. Four days out at rest. But going out to rest was a doubtful privilege, and the journey back to camp at Vlamertinghe often cost more in casualties than the four-day stint in the front line. The crouching hours of toil, newly completed, often seemed preferable to the weary men to the long slog back across the duckboards through the hail of screaming shells. If you made it to Hellfire Corner there was transport to take you to rest billets at Vlamertinghe. Transport of a kind!
They Called it Passchendaele Page 3