‘I was on duty from 6pm to 6am up at the mine last night,’ he told Pips, in a brief letter written after he returned. ‘You have to see that the men work properly and there your duties are practically at an end: during the night you make rounds to see that the work is being well done and then you are able to go down the mine into the officers’ dugout and get a nap.’ [The job of his men, as he described in his later memoir, was to remove all of the chalk which was being dug out of the tunnel by night and day, and empty it into shell holes in the plain above, taking great care to conceal the evidence from German aircraft.]
When he was not on duty in the mine his time was largely his own, although he had to keep an eye on the men (to make sure, as he told his mother, ‘that they shave and keep themselves and their rifles clean’), and be available in case some emergency needed his attention (like today, when he had been called away several times to ‘see to rations etc’).
Into the Mine. From Memories of Active Service, Vol 2, facing page 314. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: 2332/3/9/3/4)
In a subsequent letter to Pips, written later that same day, he repeated the tale of how he had been assigned to the Tunnellers, his travels through the French countryside (‘the nearer you arrive to the line the more battered and the more desolate does the country become’) and his efforts (with 2nd Lt Gibson) to secure dugouts and rations for their 60 men. Their initial problem on arriving was that no-one had thought to secure rations for the new men, but they quickly found four men with ‘the necessary intelligence to make some stew and tea for the first relief…tins of bully beef, pork & beans, onions and a little fresh meat, biscuits to look like potatoes were all put in, and a very appetising looking stew was the result.’ At the same time he and Gibson feasted on ‘soup tablets, eggs and some meat and bacon, some tinned pears and some coffee’. Although their servants worried that the meat was ‘…cut orf the wrong part for frying’, the two officers enjoyed ‘quite a nice meal’ nonetheless.
He told Pips that things were now beginning to settle down. They had found a good corporal to issue out the rations, and he and Gibson were each taking every other 12-hour night shift at the mine, where they could get some sleep if necessary. He was finding the work interesting and was enjoying having his own party of men to look after. He told his mother that he and Gibson were sharing ‘quite a comfy dugout’, which was ‘fairly far back from the line’ [in fact, far enough to be out of range of Minnies, which pleased him greatly]. The toughest part of the job was ‘when we are on at night, floundering in the mud.’ On the whole, though, it was ‘quite a nice job’, which he hoped would last for some time.
[Next letter: 28 October]
