Tales Of The Tunnellers

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 280, 26 November 1938, Page 11 (Supplement)

Tales Of The Tunnellers

0 F OUT t*oop« who fought w «n the Great War there are none that have been so little heard of as the tunnellers. This seems somewhat remarkable, for their work, though done in the darkness and underground, was as valuable and even as heroic as that of any other branch of the service. The oAlcorn of tl»o Tunnellors were in civil life mostly engineers and mine ma ringers. From superintending road work, railway work, bridge building «,„| ff°ldniining in remote parts of (lie country, th<«« men -were summoned to dn ••ome wonderful burrowing in France. The rank and Hie were generally miners and navvies. Never did tliev Work a* hard at a likely seam of ore or a cooperative cutting as they did in liewiny out the tunnels at the far front.

t those points a young volcano erupted e once< upon a time either on tlie part j of >ritz- or on our part.'' ' i-i ''\ e "'hots' w«>re dotted over the map like holes in a |>cpper pot. It was a kind of game to try to make Fritz blow up his mine preniaS ture I v or alternatively to place one of 3 ours in a favourable "position and blow e it up where it would cause -Mr. Hun most inconvenience. You played, in fact, a kind of weird poker with* him. You n knew he was listening for the strokes

By--iV. A. Winter

Many of them were grey-Hcards who suffered a strange rejuvenation when it breams a question of enlisting. It was noticed an A very curious coincidence that the majority of the«e men were 3fl ycarrf old—-the maximum age for enlistment being 40. One sturdy southern miner gave hi* age a# 38, whorea* his father, joining another unit, went on the liat a* 39. The Job Spreading out hia maps on a taMe in front of the present writer—beautifully executed limps. hy the way, frayed mid worn from use—an ex-ofTicer of the Tuniicllera explained how the job »M done. "There—ln red." ho pointed out, "are Fritz's tunnels,-and there are oiity —in blue." One saw a pair-of thick lines, roughly parallel to ono another, zig-zngging arrows the country, Mch throwing oilt brulicli linen, like feelers, towards the opposing one. f "These circles with a big dot in the )' middle fend Ixmriug fancy names such 1 as Martha, Mary Jane., Kgauruho* arc 'shot*.' They fliat dt cadi ot

of your pick r.nd when you wore getting what the children in their game* call 'hot.' you would sometimes increase the i force of your stroke* so an to make him f think that you were nearer than you 1 actually were. Often the trick worked ' j and bun;; went the <>ertnan mine, doing your little ej&'avation no damage. hut spoiling a lot of hi*, and so, of course. B wanting much of his valuable time and his good explosives. 7 "That listening business became a < fine art. Bv means of a pair of microphones connected with an earpiece, one " diagnosed the source of a sound a* »*nreiv a< a go<*l doctor wijji a stethoB scope locates a •diocase.' 'Tap, tap, tap.' i You listened to the muffled sound of ! the blow* till you heard yourself saving f as Hamlet said to his father's ghost,

Little - Heard -Of Service

'Hallo, old mole, ean'st work in the eartli so fast?' and then you took measures to work a counter mine to cut liini off. 1 tie detail of this was something like the work at Okahukura that you have seen us doing." " I his was chiefly at Messines, was it not? ' asks the listener in his innocence. "My dear man, we were nowhere near Messines. ' Arras was our lav. We coquetted with that ancient village for the best part of two years. We made approaches to it. We dodged it, we mined and drove on every *ide of it — incidentally we made some droll discoveries." "W hat was the object in view*—to occupy the town 1"

"Xo. At certain times that would have been sudden death. The objefct was to prepare in its neighbourhood underground accommodation for some 50(H) men in readiness for the final big ptiwh. I'll explain this to you later. "Now we were told that there existed a secret passage made by the monks of old and leading from Arras to a village some six miles away—Boiivaines, I think it was. Xo, I can't spell it — never was much good at French. We were told to look for it. We didssent— *|>ent months boring holes and putting in drivus (with a good few losses of our men, I may say), feeling ahout as it were for this blessed arcade —-goodness knows if it ever existed tit all—till at last we were fed up with- the business and we said, in effect, to the general staff. 'Why continue this dashed game of Blindman'* Buffi

We'll build you a fresli tunnel up to tlie walls of this old tapestry factory.' TlieV said, 'Go ahead, Diggers,' and we did it. "It was easy country—a formation softer than Oamaru stone hut somewhat ■ ( harder than English chalk. Here and there we struck huge caverns."' (He dis- * played a map of them.) '"The ancient Arrussians had, it ' a|)|H*ars, quarried all their building ; material out of these, and tlie entrances had afterwards been closed up. These t caverns were, as it turned out, a regular godsend to us. They made excellent bivvies. I bey were lighted by electricity, and it was in one of them that we stowed awflv men just before the real big final advance. Contest of Brain With Brain It was here,' continued the tunneller, ( "that some specialists of the Koval Engineers did some tip-top work in the way of locating German guns. *liist imagine it. Here we were 100 ft underground, so deep that wo could not catch a sound of the enemy's guns in front of our firing lines or the bursting of their shells behind us, and yet in that silence the men whose special job it was, were able to ascertain the instant when u German gun was fired and not only that, but to prick down on a chart the exact spot where the gun was situated. Within four minutes—usually thiee and a half minutes to be precise— our battery behind the lines was rung up and given the position, so as to land an answering shell within fatal distance of Fritz's howitzer. How did the Royal Engineers work that little miracle? "Well you see, they had a line of microphones on the surface, placed at known intervals frorn each other and at known distances from our lair. Electric wires connected them all to a little machine placed before the lens of a cinematic camera. This reeled off its ribbon at a known rate of speed. A wheel, too, revolved in front of the lens and its spokes interrupted the light at tegular intervals and le£t on the negative a series of closely drawn parallel cross lines at distances' almost perfectly equal. Notf when one of the microphones responded to a sound a blur instantaneously occurred on the negative, and by calculations with which I need not trouble you, the distances between the successive blurs on the film were made to disclose the spot whence the sound originated. "I understand that the idea of this did not originate with us. To give the de il liis due, Fritz thought of it first, but as with so many other ideas we improved it out of sight. He got only as far as stationing men with stopwatches at certain intervals so as to get bis data. \ou did not happen to notice an article in a mining journal in which the writer described his inarching, in the final big push, over the ground near Arras and noticing t lie extraordinary number of German big guns put out of action. He said the British .Artillerymen had yre.it luck! Luck, was it! I don't think!"