SAPPERS’ WAR.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 7710, 20 April 1916, Page 1

SAPPERS’ WAR.

UNDERGROUND FIGHTS. BIG MINE EXPLOSIONS. ‘ ‘ After a new series of mine explosions, accompanied by a very violent bombardment,, the Germans delivered an attack on a front of about 1500 yards. . . At two points where our firing trench had been broken do™ by explosions they were able to occupy the craters, of which most were soon re-taken.” These words are from a French communique relating to the front about Neuville-Saint Vaast. Nothing better (says the London “Daily Chronicle”) marks the crystallisation of the Western front than these desperate efforts, in which the sappers and miners plough a short way for the infantry, to seize and hold a yawning hole 50ft or 100 ft in diameter. If it is seized thousands of telegraph clerks are engaged in sending the news to the end of the earthy and when it is recaptured there is another paragraph for the famous “communique.” Preparations for such an event entail hard and dangerous labor underground for many days. The sapper, furnished with curious tools, stands day and night at the face of his gallery', which is just deep enough to stand up in, pushing it forward inch by inch towards the enemy trench. Sometimes, in a momentary silence while his own machine has stopped, he catches the faint sound of an enemy miner tunnelling a. way towards him and the lines behind. It is an agonising moment. Will it be best to drive straight ahead, in the hope of being able to reach the opposed trench before the enemy can reach bis own; or to direct a branch sap under the other, and blow him into eternity? Sometimes a French ' sapper has suddenly found his pick go through a thin layer of earth, and lay open the end of a German gallery'. If men are busy there he is detected, and a primitive, hand-to-hand struggle takes place in the dark, narrow cavern, followed quickly by a terrible explosion, and a more considerable in the open, overhead. From the trenches whence the attack has been planned, the men leap over their parapets, race down into the crater and up the other side, and there attempt to hold the edge against counter-attack until jt can he provided with a parapet and made an integral part of the first-line trench. It will then become a slight salient, dangerous in itself, but constantly threatening to the enemy. If both antagonists—at first only 50 from each side, perhaps, but very quickly reinforced —get into the crater together a frightful struggle will ensue; and it may continue for hours, or give rise to repeated coun-ter-attacks. Bombs, Maxims, rifles, the bayonet, and even spades and extemporised clubs, are all brought into play in this melee; and it is, perhaps, the smallest weapon —the hand grenade, which bursts into a hundred raggededged fragments of cast-iron—that is the most deadly. The traditional hell of the theologians is a holiday resort compared with the places of such encounters. I have seen them with a shudder, days afterwards, when the tide of battle has gone further forward —giant pock-marks in the face of the earth, and stained a yellow-green with the fumes of high-explosives.