UNDERGROUND WAR

LIFE BELOW NO MAN’S LAND

From Philip Gibbs. War Correspondents’ Headquarters, France, Sunday

I went into a world the other day where no shells, bursting high or bursting low, can have any effect upon our men who live there. No German barrage can “put the wind up,” because in this world there is no wind. Visibility may be good or bad, but the enemy has no observation here, though he is on top all the time. I went out into No Man’s Land beyond our lines, and was as safe as in the Strand at home, though only a few yards away from the enemy’s outposts. For this world was deep underground. It is a place of long galleries, 60ft below the outside earth, in which one may walk for hours and hours and not come to the end of them. I walked for hours and my guide pointed to the entrance of another gallery and said: “That would take another day to explore.”

My guide was one of the officers of the Australian Tunnelling Company, which during the past two years has done a great part of the work in boring this subterranean system below some section of our battle line. They are mostly miners from the gold fields of Western Australia – hard, tough fellows with a special code of their own as regards their ways of discipline and work, but experts at their job, and with all their pride in it, and a courage which would frighten the devils of hell if they happened to meet in the dark. When they first came over the Germans were mining actively under our lines and blowing up our infantry in the trenches. It was the worst terror of war before poison gas came.

ENEMY MINERS BEATEN

It is many months now since the enemy’s mining activities were reported in our communiqués. They were beaten out of the field by British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand miners, who fought the Germans from gallery to gallery, blowing them up again and again whenever they drew near. The Australian tunnellers drove in at three times their enemy’s speed, blew in the ends of one of his galleries and then broke through his timber into the tunnel. The dash through of the Australian tunnellers with rifles and revolvers was an exciting adventure. The enemy had escaped, but their system was destroyed before they could touch off their mines. The Germans know now that they are beaten underground, and not a single infantry soldier of ours has lost his life by hostile mining since the Australians challenged the enemy and beat him in this part of the battle front.

It is an uncanny thing to walk through this subterranean world. It was dark in the beginning of the tunnels. Men pressed against the chalk walls to let us pass, and I heard their breath, and sometimes there was the clank of steel hat against steel hat. Here and there for 500 yards or so the tunnel roof was so low that one had to walk half-doubled. A candle held by the man in front was the only light in the blackness. But presently a tall man could walk upright, and long galleries were lit by bulbs of electric light.

SUBTERRANEAN DWELLINGS

On each side of the galleries were rooms carved out of the chalk. They were furnished with wooden tables and benches, and the miners were playing cards there. Through holes in the chalk walls I looked into caverns where men lay asleep in bunks. Not far away was a room from which a fierce heat came and a smell of good food cooking. It was the kitchen, with big stoves and ovens, where meals were being cooked by sweltering men, within a few yards of the front-line trenches.

In other rooms were field dressing stations, and we came to a subway with trolley lines, down which the wounded are brought from the battlefield up above.

LISTENING TO THE GERMANS

We went deeper down and further forward. In one room men were listening like telephone operators to the sounds of German life in other tunnels like these, the sounds of men walking and talking and filling sandbags and moving timber. The listeners are so expert that they can tell by the nature of the sounds exactly what the enemy is doing through a chalk wall 70ft thick.

Presently we went into one of the fighting points beyond the lateral galleries. My guide said: “We are now out in No Man’s Land.” It was a safe and pleasant way of wandering into No Man’s Land. The war seemed a world away. It was only some hours later, when we came up to the surface of the earth and saw the sky again and the dreary waste of the battlefield, and heard the cry and crash of scattered shells, that we remembered our whereabouts and this business above ground. It is a strange life below the fields of death, and there is a sinister purpose at the end of the tunnels, but these men, by their toil and courage, have saved the lives of many hundreds of British soldiers, and long after the war is finished this underground world of theirs will remain as a memorial of their splendid labour.