- from ‘the Sphere’, September 30th, 1916
- 'Underground Life in France'
Officers' Shelters in the Trenches
a French colonel in an underground shelter
It is one of the many surprises of the war that long-range artillery, accurate rifle-fire, and all the other modern methods of waging warfare, should have the quite opposite effect from that which was at first intended. Instead of keeping the two contending armies as far apart as possible, they have actually approached nearer than ever to one another. This, of course, has only been possible by the adoption of all sorts of devices — elaborate sand-bagged trenches with traverses leading up to them, periscope apparatus, head cover, shell-proof dug-outs, and other similar arrangements. The dug- outs and bomb-proof shelters in particular are most wonderful constructions ; all correspondents who have been privileged to explore the interiors of these shelters are loud in praise of them. Mr. Frederick Palmer, for instance, in his very distinguished book, My Year of the War (John Murray), describes his experiences in these underground homes: —
"Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a dug-out, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining the section which we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over his shelter from shell - storms. The only time that British generals become boastful is over their dug-outs. They take all the pride in them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a home ; and, like him, they keep on making improvements and calling attention to them. I must say that this was one of the best shelters I have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am certainly an expert in dug-outs. Of course, this general said, 'At your own risk !' He was good enough to send a young officer with us up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the 200 yards which we had taken from the Germans.
"In this section the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with passages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go and come hidden from sight. An officer calls attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of a member of a chamber of commerce pointing out the new Union Station.
"With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for the soldiers, which brings us back to the question of munitions in the economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this kind which I had seen. You never go up to the trenches without seeing something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in saving lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and salvage compete with destruction. After a bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed dug-outs to be ready for another go.
"We noticed that all the men were in their dug-outs ; none were walking about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer — stormy." Mr. Palmer's experiences are fully borne out by Mrs. Edith Wharton, who has seen similar erections. In her book, Fighting France (Macmillan), she writes:
"Above the road the wooded slopes rose interminably, and here and there we came on tiers of mules, three or four hundred together, stabled under the trees, in stalls dug out of different levels of the slope. Near by were shelters for the men, and perhaps at the next bend a village of 'trappers' huts' as the officers call the log-cabins they build in this region. These colonies are always bustling with life. Men busy cleaning their arms, hauling material for new cabins, washing or mending their clothes, or carrying down the mountain from the camp-kitchen the two-handled pails full of steaming soup. The kitchen is always in the most protected quarter of the camp, and generally at some distance in the rear. Other soldiers, their job over, are lolling about in groups, smoking, gossiping, or writing home, the soldiers' letter-pad propped on a patched blue knee, a scarred fist laboriously driving the fountain pen received in hospital. Some are leaning over the shoulder of a pal who has just received a Paris paper, others chuckling together at the jokes of their own French journal."
a staff planning headquarters
