Tommy by Richard Holmes Read Free Book Online Page B

face. Now and then we listened in, and heard the enemy working in their counter saps. 176
    But most infantrymen were soon convinced that they would rather be in a trench than down a mine. One of Bernard Adams’s comrades told him what it was like down there.
    First of all you go down three or four ladders; it’s awfully tricky work at the sort of halt on the way down, because there’s a little platform, and very often the ladder goes down a different side of the shaft after one of these halts … It’s a terrible long way down, and of course you go alone … I didn’t go far up the gallery where they were working because you can’t easily pass along, but the RE officer took me along a gallery that is not being worked, and there, all alone, at the end of it was a man sitting. He was simply sitting, listening. Then I listened through his stethoscope thing … and I could hear the Boche working as plainly as anything … as we went away and left him, he looked round at us with staring eyes just like a hunted animal. To sit there for hours on end, listening. Of course, while you hear them working, it’s all right, they won’t blow. But if you
don’t
hear them! God, I wouldn’t like to be an RE. It’s an awful game.
    â€˜We always laugh at these REs for looking like navvies, and for going about without gas-helmets or rifles,’ reflected Adams. ‘But really they are wonderful men. It’s awful being liable to be buried alive at any moment.’ 177
    Galleries ran into wide chambers that were filled (armed was the technical phrase) with explosive, usually ammonal, contained either in waterproof bags or tins, tamped firmly by sandbags to prevent too much of the blast from blowing back along the line of least resistance down the tunnel. The explosives were initiated by a pattern of electric detonators, stretching round the chamber like the nerves of a hand, and joined to a main cable which ran down the tunnel to a firing-point in a trench, where an engineer officer would push the handle of an electric exploder to fire the mine. Sometimes there was a firing dugout further back, with a small generator providing electricity, connected to the mine by a simple throw-over switch. Usually the officers firing mines expressed relief and satisfaction that the mine had exploded as planned. But one, a son of the manse, knelt and doffed his steel helmet before he thrust down the plunger, begging God’s mercy for the men he was about to kill.
    Spectators found mine explosions perhaps the most unnatural of the bizarre spectacles furnished by the front line. Bernard Adams was enjoying a mug of tea in a front line trench when:
    There was a faint ‘Bomp’ from goodness knows where. And a horrid shudder. The earth shook and staggered and I set my legs apart to keep my balance. It felt as if the whole ground were going to be tilted up. The tea splashed over the fire-step as I hastily put it down. Then I looked up. There was nothing. What had happened? Was it a
camouflet
[small mine] after all? Then, over the sandbags, appeared a great green meadow, slowly, taking its time, not hurrying, a smooth curved dome of grass, heaving up, up, up like a rising cake; then, like a cake, it cracked, cracked visibly with bursting brown seams; still the dome rose, towering ten, twenty feet up above the surrounding level; and then with a roar the black smoke hurtled into the air, followed by masses of pink flame creaming up into the sky, giving out a bonfire heat and lighting up the twilight with a lurid glare! Then we all ducked to avoid the shower of mud and dirt and chalk that pattered down like hail.
    â€˜Magnificent,’ I said to Scott.
    â€˜Wonderful,’ he answered.
    â€˜The mud’s all in your tea, sir,’ said Davies.
    â€˜Dr-r-r-r-r-r’ rattled the Lewis guns. The Lewis gunners with me had been amazed rather than thrilled by the awful