SOLDIERS 'HOUSE HUNTING'

Wanganui Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15133, 30 January 1917, Page 7

SOLDIERS 'HOUSE HUNTING'

SEARCH FOE DUG-OUTS.. INCIDENT ON SOMME FRONT. Reuter’s correspondent at the British headquarters in France writes: Dug-outs must be obtained somehow, and if the worst comes to the worst you may have to make them yourself. But how much preferable it is if instead of this you can walk into dug-outs which t>he enemy made and from which you have driven him! I saw an officer wandering amoim the medley of small heaps that constitute the-village of Beaumont Hamel. He was picking the soft earth her© and there with his cane, and occasionally he stopped and lifted a clod of clay or an old shell-case or a piece of planking and looked solemnly and seriously underneath it. “What you look for,” h5 explained to me, “is a hole or any sign of timber sticking out of the mud.” He poked his stick at a little cleft between two clumps of clay. It was no bigger than a walnut, hut as he worked his stick in it the hole became larger. Then a clump of clay from the side of it became detached and fell, somewhere into the bowels of the earth, leaving a jagged hole quite a- foot in diameter. Stooping down by the edge- of it, he inserted his stick deep in the opening, and moved it freely from side to side. And then he tapped the side of it under ground, and "ther<s came up the unmistakable sign of solid timber. “Got one,” he said, excitedly, like a boy catching a minnow. “Shouldfl’t be surprised if its a first rate one.” When the hole was cleared of all clay and old i&ells and uaexploded hand bombs and other litter of war that was accumulated there, below there lay revealed a fine dug-out. The Germans had made it and lived in it, and our shells had covered it with debris and hidden it . Its walls were lined with the stoutest timber planking. It had cubicles and a main passage many yards f6ng —altogether sleeping room and shelter from shell-fire for quite a number of men. Before many hours the place had been cleared sufficiently for occupation, and that night our sturdy fellows would find warmth ■ and shelter down there instead of having to live perhaps in the open until they had time to make dug-outs of t-heir own, which is always a toilsome business. And you may say that iyith every town and village taken in this advance on the Somme the great game of “prospecting”, .for dug-outs has to be played.