MINING WARFARE

Waikato Times, Volume 87, Issue 13245, 29 July 1916, Page 8

MINING WARFARE

GERMAN SAPPERS' COSTLY MISTAKE. The Argonne is an ideal country for mine warfare. For months and months (says the representative of the British prsss with the French army) the opposing lines have been in close contact, and each side has done its best to make the adversaries' lives impossible by every diabolical means provided by modern science. "The mine, however, is like the grenade," one of the generals in the Argonne told me; "almost as dangerous to the man wbo uses it as to the man against whom it is directed." He had good reason to be pleased with the ill-success of the German mines sprung in his sector during the past few days. The enemy had made up his mind to accomplish something "kolossal," and had crammed some 30 tons of high explosives into a saphead which he fondly believed was under the advanced French trenches. When the moment came there was a terrific explosion, and the waiting German infantry dashed out of their cover, hoping to capture without difficulty that part of the lines which they imagined had been completely pulverised. They had not much time to appreciate the situation, as they were received with a murderous fire from the exact point which they supposed to have been wrecked. Some of them, but not many, got back to their trenches, and they no doubt realised that their sappers had made a slight error of directions, and with infinite trouble and pains had sunk and sprung a mine in the debateable ground between the opposing trenches. Result—thirty ton* of high explosive wasted, a number of German infantrymen hors de combat, and a very big hole at a point where it made no difference to anyone.