Tommy by Richard Holmes Read Free Book Online Page A

British mine had been exploded under Hill 60 just over two years before. Each army now had a Controller of Mines with a specialist staff. There were more than 30,000 men in British, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian tunnelling companies and their supporting units. In suitable areas a shallow defensive mine gallery, intended to detect and disrupt German mining, would run below the front line. Offensive mines ran deeper, their horizontal galleries generally approached by way of a vertical shaft. In the Messines area miners sinking these shafts had to contend with surface soil, then sludgy quicksand, and then a layer of blue clay which expanded on contact with the air and had to be very carefully shored up with stout timber to prevent the shaft from caving in.
    Clay-kickers, lying against their wooden frames, drove the galleries forward. Their mates shovelled the spoil they excavated into sandbags and dragged them back to the start of a track which carried trolleys, and these were pushed along to the shaft. Men working at the top hoisted the sandbags to the surface, and once there they then had to be shifted far enough behind the British front line for their presence not to make the mine shafts obvious to aerial observation. Hand-operated pumps sent fresh air down into the galleries, and miners took canaries down with them, keeping a watchful eye on the bird’s health as they worked. Breathing apparatus helped rescue squads to make their way to men overwhelmed by gas. Frank Dunham of 25/London found it ‘most interesting to see these miners digging away, and strutting up with planks of wood as they went along. Where the width of the tunnel permitted, trolleys were used to wheel the soil away. Another strange thing was that these tunnels were lit by electric light, worked from a dynamo.’ 174
    Sapper Jack Lyon of 171 Tunnelling Company helped dig one of the mines beneath Messines Ridge, exploded with such effect on 7 June 1917:
    Each shift comprised twelve men with an RE Corporal in charge. At the face were three men who were RE Sappers. Three men worked the trolleys, one man manned the ‘windjammer’ or air pump. One man at the shaft-bottom kept the sump there empty and hitched sandbags to the rope from the windlass at the pithead. [There were] two men at this windlass, one man unhitching the bags and passing them back to the other, who took them to the dumping ground. At the tunnel face one man was engaged in ‘clay-kicking’. Sitting with his back against an inclined plank fixed between the floor and the roof he used both feet to press a small sharp spade called a ‘grasper’ into the face and lever out a lump of clay. [His mate] put this into a sandbag. When full, the bag was passed to the third man who dragged it to the far end of the trolley-rails. As each man was a Sapper, they could relieve each other so the face-man ‘kicked’ for two hours of the six-hour shift.
    It was small wonder that Plumer’s chief of staff had announced that although they might not change history, they would certainly change geography. These tunnellers worked three shifts in two days and then had a day off. After fifteen days they were withdrawn ‘for a bath and delousing operations, the latter being only partially successful’. 175
    Although sappers were the stars of mining, as usual the infantry provided the scene shifters, and generally complained about it. Lieutenant Ernest Parker remembered that:
    Towards evening we daily journeyed to the front line and there, in shifts of eight hours, worked under the orders of a company of New Zealand sappers who were tunnelling under the German trenches. At the top of the sap, we hauled a continuous stream of chalk-filled bags, carrying them outside and unloading the chalk some distance from the sap-head. By special favour, I was sometimes allowed to crawl down the deep shaft, where I could cautiously watch the New Zealanders working at the rock