1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [233]
That time was a long way off, and it was just as well that van Nieuwenhove had managed to recover the hidden money and valuables, for living in Paris was expensive. It would be almost four years before he came again to Ypres, and by then it was almost razed to the ground. It had taken exactly seven days to accomplish his mission. He reached Paris on 19 July. In the Ypres salient, two hundred miles to the north, it was a day of notable excitement. They intended to blow up Hooge.
Major Cowan of 175 Tunnelling Company was in charge of the project, Lieutenant Cassels was in charge of the work, and a detachment of coal-miners, newly co-opted into the Royal Engineers, was responsible for actually doing it. They were not young men, they were untrained and, to say the least, unskilled in soldiering. They were also unused to marching and it had been a wearisome business getting them from the railhead to the front. But they were experienced miners and once they had reached the line and were given a job to do, they knew precisely how to do it. The pit-men were not particularly enjoying their strange surroundings and when the Germans shelled, which was most of the time, they were clearly happier underground – and that was all to the good, for the tunnels had to be dug at top speed and there was no time to be lost. After several false starts and many alarms the work was completed in less than a month. But there had been anxious moments.
Major S. H. Cowan.
A wire was brought to me saying that Cassels had heard mining under our own trenches. After convincing himself that the Germans were under us, he had reported to the infantry officer in command and had organised a retrenched line round their probable ‘crater’. It was too late to attempt to blow their mine as they were already under our feet. Cassels then withdrew his men – who are not trained soldiers – to Battalion Headquarters, then, on the advice of the Colonel, to their back billets. I consider he did right.
It would be pathetic, were it not so absolutely absurd, to count how many people there are who are willing to swear that the Germans have actually mined under our trenches from no other evidence than lying on the ground and listening to every blessed overground noise there is. One case we traced to a sentry kicking his heels together twenty yards away. Two other scares were traced, one to a nest of young rats, the second to a loose shutter in a ruin about a hundred and fifty yards away which kept on ‘dabbing’ irregularly in the wind. But I must own that everyone’s nerves are at their very worst between midnight and the very welcome dawn.
There is only one way of hearing real underground sounds and that is, dig down about six feet, then forward for about ten feet under your own parapet. Next, hang a curtain to shut out noises from your own people, who should be sent away for twenty yards or so. Then, at last, lie down and perhaps you’ll hear the Germans. If you do, it’s time to send for the Corps Travelling Company, but meanwhile, you’d better keep on listening, remembering all the time that so long as you do hear him you are safe. When he stops work all you can do is to clear out and wait, ready to rush his crater before he arrives.
It was one of many false alarms, but it was an understandable mistake, for the Germans were indeed working underground – but they were working beneath their own line, burrowing dug-outs and constructing the first of the concrete strongpoints they believed would make it impregnable. It was perfectly obvious to the German Command that their tenancy of the high ground around the salient would not go unchallenged for long. The British had tried once to wrest it back, and they would certainly try again. Since the capture of their old front line on the lower slopes of the ridge, the Germans had been working day and night. They had built a tangle of new trenches, strong and deep, looping back on themselves to form four-sided redoubts, girded with stout wire, and pushed forward