I went down one of our mines one night. I was spending the night in our
trenches and the captain in command of this particular section asked
me if I would care to see "our mine." Considerations of the censorship
impel me to abridge what follows up to the moment when I found myself
in a square, greasy gallery, with clay walls propped up by timber balks
leading straight out in the direction of the German trenches. Guttering
candles stuck on the balks at intervals faintly lit up as strange a
scene as I have witnessed in this war.
Deep in the bowels of the earth a thick, square-set man in khaki
trousers and trench boots, a ragged vest displaying a tremendous torso
all glistening with sweat, was tipping clay out of a trolley and gently
chaffing in a quite unprintable English of the region of Lancashire a
hoarse but invisible person somewhere down the shaft.
I crawled round the quizzer, slipping on the greasy planks awash with
muddy water on the floor of the gallery, and found myself confronted
by another of the troglodytes, a man who was so coated with clay that
he appeared to be dyed khaki (like the horses of the Scots Greys) from
top to toe. I asked him whence he came, so different was he, in speech
and appearance, from the black-haired, low-browed Irishmen watching at
the parapet of the trench far above us. "A coom fra' Wigan!" he said,
wiping the sweat from his forehead with a grimy hand, and, thus saying,
he turned round and made off swiftly, bent double as he was, down the
low gallery.
I followed, the water swishing ankle-deep round my field boots. The air
was dank and foul; the stooping position became almost unbearable after
a few paces; one slipped and slithered at every step.
At intervals side-galleries ran out from the main gap, unlit, dark
and forbidding--listening posts. After a hundred paces or so a
trolley blocked the way. Behind it two men were working, my taciturn
acquaintance and another. The latter was hacking at the virgin earth
with a pick; the former was shoveling the clay into the trolley.
I had not been out of that mine for more than a minute when an electric
lamp flashed in my eyes, and an excitable young man, who held an
automatic pistol uncomfortably near my person, accosted me thus: "I beg
your pardon, sir"--it occurred to me that the pistol accorded ill with
this polite form of address--"but may I ask what you were doing down my
mine?" My friend, the Captain, rushed forward with an explanation and
an introduction, the pistol was put away, and the sapper subaltern was
easily persuaded to come along to the dugout and have a drop of grog
before turning in.
One story of the mines which made everybody laugh was that of the
subaltern fresh out from home, a keen young officer, who came one night
to the dug-out of the sapper officer supervising the digging of a mine.
"You must go up at once," he whispered in his ear in a voice hoarse
with excitement, "it is very important. Lose no time." The sapper had
gone to his dug-out worn out after several sleepless nights, and was
very loath to sally forth into the cold and frosty air. "It is a mine,
a German mine," said the subaltern fresh out from home; "you can see
them working through the glasses." The sapper was out in a brace of
shakes, and hurriedly followed the subaltern along the interminable
windings of the trenches.
In great excitement the subaltern led him to where a telescope rested
on the parapet. "Look!" he said dramatically. The sapper applied his
eye to the glass. There was a bright moon, and by its rays he saw, sure
enough, figures working feverishly about a shaft. There was something
familiar about it, though; then he realized that he was looking down
his own mine. The wretched youth who had dragged him from his slumbers
had forgotten the windings of the trench.