THE HINDENBURG TUNNEL
On the day following our visit to Peronne we motored out to
Bellicourt to see the Hindenburg tunnel, of which rumour and reading
tell us so much. This tunnel was built by Hindenburg, we are told,
and if ever the British troops crossed the German defences the enemy
soldiers would conceal themselves in thousands, come out when our
men had passed by, attack them in rear and cut them to pieces. The
Hindenburg trenches might be crossed, but the Hindenburg tunnel
would be the ruin of the Allies. This and that we were told, for war
quickening the ear for rumour we believe much that in days of peace
would pass by for idle tales.
The truth of the matter is that this tunnel was not built by
Hindenburg but by Louis XVI, at whose expense the work was begun,
the cost of the undertaking being about £4,000,000, and through it
runs the great canal of Picardy. This canal passing from St. Quentin
to Cambrai had to run through a country rising so much that it was
necessary to carry it under the earth for a considerable depth, and
this canal tunnel in places is hewn entirely from rock chalk. The
work was completed by Napoleon I in 1810 and a communication opened
thereby between the river Scheldt and the extreme eastern departments
of France and the Atlantic through the rivers Somme, Seine and Loire.
At Bellicourt we descended several steps covered with mud and
littered with the wreckage of war, strands of barbed wire, rusty
rifles, German equipments, ammunition boxes, trench helmets,
sandbags, etc., all the odds and ends flung away by the German army
in retreat.
Sticking through the arched entrance of the tunnel was the prow of
a flat-bottomed barge and built over this was a chamber. In here we
made our way, crawling up long, crooked stone stairs steeped in gloom
almost impenetrable. We entered an apartment dimly lit by an opening
which let in a pale ray of light. The officer conducting our party
lit a candle and we could see the room. Under our feet was a floor of
boards holed in many places; some of the holes were very large. To
come along the floor without a light was impossible, and one false
step and a man would drop through the aperture into the canal below.
On our left as we entered stood a large wheel which was at one time
worked by a hand windlass. This wheel was used in lifting the sluice
gates to let the freight barges through.
Further along were two large coppers filled with some thick fluid
which exhaled a putrid stench. One of these coppers is now known to
history, for rumour has it that when the British soldiers took the
place they found a German dead and naked in the boiler, that the
soldier had been dissected by a surgeon, that the oven was at that
time in use for cooking meat for the German soldiery, etc.
That Germans lived there and made the place their dwelling is true,
for even now in apartments leading off from the entrance chamber
can be seen many beds bedded with straw and still covered with
army blankets. Belts for machine gun bullets litter the floor,
and opposite an opening that looks out towards the north-west is
to be seen an emplacement on which a machine gun once stood. The
fact is that the apartment was used by a machine-gun crew who made
the chamber their home, who lived there, sleeping in the place and
cooking their food in the copper.
Up above the machine-gun emplacement is to be seen a hole slanting
obliquely through the outer wall and coming to an end in the roof
of the room. It is now held by some that a shell came through here,
dropped in the midst of the gunners, burst and blew one of the men
into the copper. Of the remainder a number were killed and two or
three wounded. On the wall of the apartment can be seen many holes
and dents made by flying fragments.
This is the opinion of some. Others say that soldiers attacked the
place, ascended the stairs, bombed the inmates of the keep, killing
many, and the force of an exploding bomb blew one into the copper.
Then there is a third party, which says that the Germans were going
to use the dead man for food. This being a most improbable story is
one of the most readily believed by the public.
On leaving the canal bank and clambering up the stairs we were able
to see on left and right the trench systems built by the Germans, the
massive parapets, the long communication trenches, the emplacements
for guns, the pill-boxes and the rows of barbed wire entanglement.
How this place was stormed and taken by the British soldiery is a
miracle. How they managed to lacerate the German sinews of defence,
to hack their way through and batter down the lines erected by
Hindenburg is one of the marvels of war.
The story can never be told. Historians will arise one day and
tell how the infantry advanced taking so many kilometres of ground
despite great opposition and formidable defence. At dawn they left
the village of A----, the historian will tell us, and at dusk they
captured the hamlet of B----. But that will never make the whole
story of the operations manifest to the eyes of men. Even knowing the
place on which the battle was fought, knowing it as it is now with
the trenches still remaining and the lines of wire entanglements
still standing, it is impossible to tell the story of the encounter.
Little details, incidents which meant life or death to one, two or
a dozen men, the taking of a dug-out, the capture of a machine-gun
emplacement, the scramble across the broken wire on the trail of a
tank, the hand-to-hand fight in a dark cellar are forgotten, even
by those who have taken part in them. Only the principal outlines
and outstanding features of the gigantic contest can be portrayed by
the historian. Little personal affairs, stories of squads and crews,
belong, as Napoleon once remarked, "rather to the biography of the
regiments than to the history of the Army." And the exploits of small
bodies of men, of infantry squads, of machine-gun crews will live for
a little while only when veterans of the war exchange confidences
over a backyard fence in days of peace and when they fight their
battles over again, tracing with their pipe shanks on their hands the
lines of trench taken and held, the redoubt lost, the ground on which
the hand-to-hand conflict took place and all other various little
doings which were part and parcel of the greater battle.
The historian will give the mere outlines of the struggle. In four
lines of cold print he shall tell how ---- Regiment left the village
of A---- at dawn and in face of almost insurmountable difficulties
took the hamlet of B---- at dusk. Here the regimental historian may
come in and add a little, telling how "B" company was held up by the
wires, how "A" company with reckless dash, came to the assistance
of their mates, how Sergeant ---- urged the men forward, how no one
faltered, how, with set teeth, they set themselves to the task of
getting through and how in the end victory was gained. But still
there is a lot more to be told, the pining and waiting of the women
left at home, the sleepless nights when letters from the loved ones
have not come to hand, the weary misery of mothers who have lost
their sons, of wives who have lost their husbands. In this story of
war there is laughter and tears, courage and timidity, weakness and
strength, sorrow and death. Even those who have fought know very
little of what took place, they have been mere atoms moving backward
and forward in the vast fluctuation, blinded in the obscurity of the
conflict. For them the battle has been a mirage having in it nothing
that is fixed or stable, a great hallucination.
The line was taken, but even those who took part in the operations
know not how the superhuman was accomplished, how the miracle was
performed.
"It was a tough nut to crack," said a Digger to whom I spoke, asking
him of the battle. "But we got through somehow."
"It was damned stiff," said another, shrugging his shoulders as if to
belittle the effort of men in the operations. "Damned stiff, but we
had the guns and the tanks."
"For God's sake don't put your hand on that!"
It was an officer with two rows of ribbons on his breast and the
gold stripe in triplicate on his sleeve who spoke. He was a veteran
soldier who had fought in many campaigns and who knew war as it is
waged on more than one continent. Now he was looking at one of our
party who had bent to lift a German helmet from the ground near the
mouth of the tunnel. The souvenir searcher held himself erect and
fixed a look of inquiry on the officer.
"It may be a booby trap," the officer explained.
"That, sir?" he said, in a voice of incredulity.
"Probably not," said the officer. "But one never knows. When we took
Peronne and the Diggers set about clearing the streets of dead, some
of our boys found a dead German lying on a stretcher. Two of them
bent down with the intention of lifting the man and carrying him to a
grave. And the stretcher and the dead man on it and the two Diggers
went sky high, for the contrivance was attached to a mine by a strand
of wire. On another occasion an officer friend of mine went into a
dug-out in the front line, recently captured from the Germans. Quite
snug and comfortable. He lived in it for three days, but at the end
of that time it went up, carrying him with it. It was all planned out
before the Germans left. Somewhere in the roof of the dug-out was a
certain acid, which fell drop by drop on a wire, eating it away. When
the wire was cut something which it held up fell, struck a spark and
an explosion took place. Again, a party of Americans found one of
their dead lying on the barbed wire entanglements in No Man's Land
the other day and they went forward to lift him off and bury him. An
engineer saved the men by rushing up and yelling to them to clear
off. Then when an examination was made it was found that the soldier
was tied to the entanglement with a wire and this wire was connected
with an explosive."
"And that's how they wage war!" said the civilian. "The beasts!"
"It's the nature of the animal," said the officer with the air of a
man pronouncing a known truth. "When Peronne was taken it was placed
out of bounds for sixty days to the Australian troops, so that the
engineers could have time to go through the place and remove all
booby-traps. And it was filled with them. The first two Tommies who
entered the place were blown up. Doors were tried by the engineers,
for doors idly open or tightly shut were often death-traps. Lift
the latch and something goes bang! and you go bang with it. Shut a
door and hey! an explosion. 'Twas the same right through the place.
A spade thrown carelessly down, a clock ticking harmlessly, a rifle
flung away, a trench helmet lying on the street, each and any of
these might be traps. We have to move carefully after the retreating
Germans, and mopping up doesn't always consist of clearing the Huns
out of dug-outs but of clearing up the litter left on the field."
Of this and that the officer spoke, but now and again he came back
to the subject of booby traps. The man, although a brave soldier,
as the ribbons on his breast and the service stripes on his sleeve
testified, dreaded the booby traps. He spoke of trip wires on the
field, or wires in the cellars of captured villages, of wires by the
roadway, in the trench and on the parapet, all connected with land
mines and hidden explosives.
But the process of mopping up has humour of its own, and he spoke
with relish of suspicious objects lying in towns, villages, in
farmyards, and out on the open land between the lines. Men gazed at
these askance, moved them gingerly only to find that they were quite
harmless. Once he saw a stretcher lying in No-Man's Land, and fearing
to move it he tied a rope to one of the handles, came in to the
trench and got the men to pull the stretcher in. And they pulled and
brought it in, but nothing happened.
Again he spoke of an incident dealing with the capture of Peronne. A
colonel walking along a street stopped to peep inside a house which
had stood its beating well. This residence was apparently used by the
Germans as a battalion headquarters, for a number of papers littered
the floor and on the table was placed a box of cigars. But what
attracted the officer's eyes was a gold watch hanging by a copper
wire from the wall. His own wrist watch had got broken that morning
and the officer wanted a watch. But the wire roused his suspicions.
If he pulled it or tampered with it something of which he could never
give a report might happen.
He decided to work warily, and finding a string he tied it round the
watch, then paying out the string he walked into the open and made
himself snug in a shell-hole which yawned on the street. Once there
he gave the string a tug but nothing happened. He pulled again and
again and still the watch held firm. But on the seventh or eighth tug
the cord came away. He pulled it into the shell-hole to find nothing
in the loop. Getting to his feet he went into the house. But imagine
his surprise to find the wire hanging empty from the nail to which
it was attached. The watch was gone and it was a week later that he
was able to solve the mystery when he found a splendid gold watch in
the possession of one of his own men. This Digger happened to come
along when the Colonel was tugging at the supposed booby trap, took
the watch, put it in his pocket and made his exit by a back door.
REMEMBRANCE
Was it only yesterday
Lusty comrades marched away?
Now they're covered up with clay.
Seven glasses used to be
Filled for six good mates and me--
Now we only call for three.
Little crosses neat and white
Looking lonely every night,
Tell of comrades killed in fight.
Hearty fellows they have been
And no more will they be seen
Drinking wine in Nouex les Mines.
Lithe and supple lads were they,
Merrily they marched away--
Was it only yesterday?