[The following is in relation to tunneling operations on the Western Front of World War I.]
But most infantrymen were soon convinced that they would rather be in a trench than down a mine. One of Bernard Adams’s comrades told him what it was like down there.
First of all you go down three or four ladders; it’s awfully tricky work at the sort of halt on the way down, because there’s a little platform, and very often the ladder goes down a different side of the shaft after one of these halts… It’s a terrible long way down, and of course you go alone… I didn’t go far up the gallery where they were working because you can’t easily pass along, but the RE officer took me along a gallery that is not being worked, and there, all alone, at the end of it was a man sitting. He was simply sitting, listening. Then I listened through his stethoscope thing… and I could hear the Boche [Germans] working as plainly as anything… as we went away and left him, he looked round at us with staring eyes just like a hunted animal.
To sit there for hours on end, listening. Of course, while you hear them working, it’s all right, they won’t blow. But if you don’t hear them! God, I wouldn’t like to be an RE. It’s an awful game.
Source:
Holmes, Richard. "Steel and Fire." Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918. London: HarperCollins, 2004. 461. Print.
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