The earth shakes slightly around you, dirt falling to the floor from the shock of the
explosion up above.
Thirty meters below the ground, you're safe from the exploding artillery shells, but there's
always the fear that a lucky hit will land in just the right spot and bury you alive.
It helps to shore up your tunnels with timbers, but the thought of a collapse is never far
from your mind.
You're on your knees, digging carefully with a small shovel through the hard dirt of northern
France.
The tunnel you're in is barely big enough to allow a man to stand crouched, and already
on your sixth hour of an eight hour shift of digging, you can't wait to get out and
stretch your legs again.
Of course from the sounds of it, at the moment you're probably in a much safer place down
here beneath the earth then up above.
The Great War started like most wars: politicians, alliances, misunderstandings, and a great
amount of bluff and bluster from men who would have no actual part in the war they would
inevitably start.
What nobody expected about this war though was just how damn... difficult it would be
to fight.
In the years before the war, American-born and naturalized British inventor Hiram Stevens
Maxim had developed what he called the Maxim Gun, a fully automatic machine gun capable
of delivering very high rates of fire.
Meeting a former American colleague in Vienna one day in 1882, his friend told him that
if he really wanted to make money he should invent something that would help Europeans
kill each other more efficiently, as they were so wanting to do already.
Maxim lost little time licensing out his invention to the major governments of the world, from
Britain to France and unfortunately, Germany, whom he had no idea would eventually become
a mortal enemy.
All nations produced the Maxim Gun under license, making their own improvements or modifications.
At the start of the war though, it was clear that the Allies had not taken the effectiveness
of the machine gun to heart quite as much as the Germans, who already fielded them in
their thousands versus the few hundred the British had at their disposal.
Despite being outnumbered in quantity though, Allied machine guns managed to ensure that
the quick victory Germany had hoped for would turn into a stalemate, as soldiers dug in
to hundreds of miles of trenches all across France.
The only way to budge the lines forward or backwards any was the use of massive artillery
bombardments followed by human wave infantry attacks.
The results were predictably bloody and inefficient, and the war remained completely at a stalemate.
Something, anything, had to be done, or this war might never end.
And then, both sides got the same idea: tunnels.
Artillery barrages could do little against the men fortified inside their trenches.
Unless a round managed a lucky hit directly inside a trench, it would mostly do nothing
but daze the defenders safely tucked into their trenches.
Even should a round score a direct hit though, the trenches were dug in such a manner that
they took many sharp ninety degree turns, so that a single round landing inside a trench
and exploding would kill at a maximum ten or twelve men.
Poison gas was tried, and continued to be used, and while that was initially very effective,
the wide availability of chemical protective equipment such as gas masks soon began to
erode the effectiveness of the tactic.
Then there was the fact that gases could take a very long time to disperse from the low-lying
trenches, making a follow-on assault extremely risky for your own men.
And once more, there was the machine guns.
Just a single survivor could man a machine gun and hold up an entire platoon of men charging
across the barren no man's land.
Efforts quickly turned to tunneling underground, and you yourself helped to spearhead the tactic.
The British army was quick to transfer experienced tunnelers from mines all across its empire
to the front line, and the thousands of experienced miners soon took to training soldiers for
the job.
It's not just a dirty job though, it's an extremely dangerous one.
The tunnels have to be dug quickly, and many of the safety measures one might take in a
normal mine tunnel have to be forgone.
Sometimes you're lucky to get sturdy timbers to use to shore up the roof as you work, sometimes
not, and tunnel collapses are a constant worry.
Because the diggers typically work in pairs of two, a single collapse in a tunnel will
kill both.
Then there's the enemy to worry about.
You might be safe from the artillery bombardments up above, but you're not completely safe from
being exploded down here.
It didn't take long for both sides to start digging counter-tunnels, with diggers in those
tunnels on the alert for enemy tunnelers heading their way.
Even through the thick dirt, the sound of scraping shovels can be heard a good distance
away, and once the enemy knows you're coming, he prepares a very nasty surprise for you
in the form of a large mine.
Set to explode remotely, the mine will obliterate you if you're close enough, but even if you're
far from it the shockwave can be enough to collapse your tunnel and bury you under tons
of earth.
You work carefully then, and as silently as possible.
You're aware of the fact that somewhere ahead and above you, there's likely a soldier who's
stuck a long stick in the ground and bitten on to it with his teeth.
This allows him to detect the minute vibrations caused by your digging, though another favorite
detection method involves putting a large oil barrel filled with water on the floor
of a trench, and then having a soldier simply stick their ear in the water.
The vibrations of your digging travel through the dirt and are amplified by the water, once
more giving your approach away.
Rather than talk, you use hand and arm signals, and you're grateful that at least you can
use all the light you want.
You shudder thinking about what this life might be like if you were forced to dig in
the pitch black...
At your hip is a pistol and a knife, and those might seem ridiculously out of place for an
observer, but the fact is that they could end up saving your life.
Tunneling technology is rather primitive, and it's not unheard of for German and British
tunnelers to dig straight into each other's tunnel.
Once you even heard a story of a German tunneler falling through the roof of a British tunnel!
The encounters are brief, and the fighting savage.
There's no cover and nowhere to hide in the tunnels, and if pistols don't finish the job
then it comes down to shovels and knives.
Up above mechanized warfare may have brought the Great War to a screeching halt, but down
here in the tunnels war is waged in the ancient, savage ways.
Today you dig extra carefully, referencing your map frequently.
You cannot afford to get caught, because you're digging for the chance to break a stalemate
that has lasted for years.
It's June, 1917, and twenty other teams have been digging for over a year in preparation
for what may be the greatest surprise attack in human history.
For the last three years the Germans have held onto the Messines Ridge, a naturally
fortified position that has given the German army command over a large swathe of the land
for miles.
If the ridge can be taken, the German lines will be pushed back significantly, but every
assault to date has been a dismal failure.
The ridge is simply too well defended, and no man's land is littered with the remains
of failed assaults.
The plan to take the ridge, devised by General Herbert Plumer, is as audacious as it is simple:
dig 22 tunnels under the enemy position and explode massive mines directly underneath
them.
The survivors of the mine attack will be assaulted by an infantry assault, preceded by a creeping
barrage artillery bombardment.
On paper it is a brilliant plan.
In reality, it's incredibly risky to build so many tunnels and hope they remain undetected.
Ten months ago one of those tunnels was very much detected, with German counter-miners
detecting the tunnel.
As the British diggers worked, the Germans set off a mine of their own, killing the miners
and sealing the tunnel off.
Plans to continue with the efforts on the 21 other tunnels were initially reconsidered,
but ultimately given the go-ahead.
Working much more carefully than before, you and the twenty other mining teams miraculously
managed to finish the task.
And with a few more shovelfuls of dirt, it's done.
You check the map of the front lines again and do some quick calculations.
Yep, you're there, thirty meters directly below the German trenches.
You shudder thinking about how close to the enemy you are, but then you hurry back up
the tunnel.
The next part will also require careful stealth, no sense getting this far only to get discovered
now.
The attack will commence at 0310 hours on June 7th, and six hours before the attack
you help to wheel in the massive 10,000 pound (4536 kg) mine down the tunnel.
As huge as it is, yours is actually one of the smaller mines- in total 600 tons of explosives
will be packed down below the unwitting Germans.
As the massive mine is deposited at the end of the tunnel, you pack in the area behind
it with sandbags, almost completely sealing the mine off form the rest of the tunnel.
This is so that the force of the explosion is mostly focused upwards through the soft
earth, rather than backwards down the tunnel.
The long electrical firing cable you run from the mine to the head of the shaft will allow
you to detonate it remotely, and leaves nothing to chance.
The world above your mine shaft has been a madhouse for over two weeks now, with the
British and French guns firing on the German positions since the 21st of May.
Thousands of rounds have been expended, and yet you know that with their shelters dug
deep into the earth, the artillery barrages have likely done little to weaken the Germans.
As you wait by the entrance to your mine, the firing suddenly stops.
Though you've spent most of your time underground for the last few months, you still grew accustomed
to the constant dull explosions of artillery going off somewhere above your head.
Now the silence that settles all across the front is almost unbearable...
In their trenches, the Germans slowly begin to exit their shelters, curious about the
lull in the bombardment.
Five minutes later, at 0255 hours, it becomes clear that the shelling is over- and that
means only one thing: an assault is coming.
German soldiers scramble to their trenches and man their machine guns, shooting flares
into the sky to light up the darkened no man's land.
Yet, they see nothing.
No charging soldiers or firing tanks.
No man's land is... empty.
For a full twenty minutes, there is silence.
Then, as your watch ticks over to 0310 hours, the world ends.
The explosions aren't simultaneous, each mine is laid at the end of a tunnel that's slightly
longer or shorter than its counterparts, taking it a little bit more or less time for the
firing signal to travel down the firing cord to the mine.
Plus, though all of the men responsible for setting off their mines are carefully looking
at their watches, each man is just a little bit faster or slower than the others in depressing
the firing lever.
What happens instead is a rapid series of nineteen muffled staccato bursts, and then
a single continuous roar that knocks you off your feet even a thousand meters away from
the explosions.
The earth underneath the Germans explodes outwards and upwards in massive plumes of
stone and dirt, reaching hundreds of feet into the air.
From your part of France, it seems like the entire German line has been overtaken by a
single massive pillar of fire, and for a few seconds night has turned into day.
The blast is so loud that it's heard by people all the way in London!
In an instant, ten thousand Germans are killed in the massive explosions.
The Germans would go on to be permanently routed from their positions on the vitally
strategically important Messines Ridge, and in the coming weeks would actually end up
losing more ground as they attempted to counter-attack and were pushed back.
Of the 21 mines laid down for the attack, only 19 were exploded as the other two ended
up being outside of the planned attack area.
The two remaining mines were left buried and forgotten, until 17th June, 1955 when one
of them was detonated by a lighting bolt striking the earth.
The only victim would be a cow, grazing directly above the mine.
The second undetonated mine however is lost, and though its location is believed to be
pinpointed, nobody yet has attempted to confirm it... or recover the final unexploded mine
of the Battle of Messines Ridge.