Beneath the Killing Fields: Exploring the Subterranean Landscapes of the Western Front

By Matthew Leonard

Beneath the Killing Fields of the Western Front still lies a hidden landscape of industrialised conflict virtually untouched since 1918. This subterranean world is an ambiguous environment filled with material culture that that objectifies the scope and depth of human interaction with the diverse conflict landscapes of modern war. Covering the military reasoning for taking the war underground, as well as exploring the way that human beings interacted with these extraordinary alien environments, this book provides a more all-encompassing overview of the Western Front. The underground war was intrinsic to trench warfare and involved far more than simply trying to destroy the enemys trenches from below. It also served as a home to thousands of men, protecting them from the metallic landscapes of the surface. With the aid of cutting edge fieldwork conducted by the author in these subterranean locales, this book combines military history, archaeology and anthropology together with primary data and unique imagery of British, French, German and American underground defences in order to explore the realities of subterranean warfare on the Western Front, and the effects on the human body and mind that living and fighting underground inevitably entailed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473884113

Matthew Leonard

Matthew Leonard is an international speaker, author, podcaster, and founder of the Science of Sainthood (www.ScienceOfSainthood.com), an online membership community focused on teaching authentic Catholic spirituality.An accomplished filmmaker, he has written, produced, directed, and hosted multiple best-selling Catholic video series, which have been translated into almost a dozen languages. A convert to Catholicism and former missionary to Latin America, Matthew is a frequent guest on radio and television programs across the country. His popular podcast "The Art of Catholic", is heard around the world. Matthew holds a Masters in Theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville and is the author of "Louder Than Words: The Art of Living as a Catholic" and "Prayer Works! Getting A Grip On Catholic Spirituality." He lives in Ohio with his wife Veronica and their six children. Learn more about him at MatthewSLeonard.com.

Book preview

To Jack

Depth and breadth

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

PEN & SWORD ARCHAEOLOGY

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street,

Barnsley,

South Yorkshire.

S70 2AS

Copyright © Matthew Leonard, 2016

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 78346 306 0

PDF ISBN: 978 1 47388 412 0

EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47388 411 3

PRC ISBN: 978 1 47388 410 6

The right of Matthew Leonard to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Glossary and useful terms

Modern Conflict Archaeology

Introduction

Chapter 1 – An Overview of Underground Warfare

Chapter 2 – Assaulting the Senses

Chapter 3 – The Durand Group

Chapter 4 – The Hidden Battlefield of Loos

Chapter 5 – Vimy and the Labyrinth

Chapter 6 – The Verdun Inferno

Chapter 7 – Digging in the Dark

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

First and foremost my thanks go to the Durand Group, without whom this book would not have been possible. My membership of the Group has allowed me to develop both personally and professionally, and I am indebted to all concerned for their help, knowledge and advice. In particular I would like to thank Lieutenant Colonel (Retd) Phillip Robinson and Andy Prada. Phillip is the foremost expert on the underground war in Northern France during the Great War and his attention to detail and extensive knowledge has been of great benefit to me. Andy is a founder member of the Durand Group and the project manager for our current work at Loos. For several years he has toiled tirelessly to forge links with the local community and understand the hidden secrets of the Loos battlefield. I cannot thank both of them enough for freely dedicating their time and expertise, and for being open to modern archaeological and anthropological approaches to these complex landscapes.

Professor Nicholas Saunders has assisted me with this work in too many ways to mention. Nick is the ‘founding father’ of modern conflict archaeology, and his open-minded approach to the study of the material culture of twentieth century conflict had a profound effect on me. This led directly to me studying for a doctorate in archaeology, and much of the research undertaken for that work is detailed in these pages. For all his help, advice and ‘multi-coloured’ opinions I will be forever grateful.

Writing a book is a long and often solitary experience. Through it all, my wife Kirsty has given me her full support; looking after our young child, working to support our family, accompanying me to an innumerable number of old battlefields, and allowing me the time and space to fill these pages. Without her love, friendship and encouragement I doubt this project would have been completed. Thank you for everything.

Finally, I would like to thank Pen and Sword for their patience while waiting for the finished manuscript. Both Heather and Eloise were professional, approachable and understanding as to the inevitable delays that occurred while I completed my studies. To everyone else who has contributed goes my utmost thanks and respect. I know who you are and so do you.

Glossary and Useful Terms

Modern Conflict Archaeology

THE SERIES

Modern Conflict Archaeology is a new and interdisciplinary approach to the study of twentieth and twenty-first century conflicts. It focuses on the innumerable ways in which humans interact with, and are changed by the intense material realities of war. These can be traditional wars between nation states, civil wars, religious and ethnic conflicts, terrorism, and even proxy wars where hostilities have not been declared yet nevertheless exist. The material realities can be as small as a machine-gun, as intermediate as a war memorial or an aeroplane, or as large as a whole battle-zone landscape. As well as technologies, they can be more intimately personal – conflict-related photographs and diaries, films, uniforms, the war-maimed and ‘the missing’. All are the consequences of conflict, as none would exist without it.

Modern Conflict Archaeology (MCA) is a handy title, but is really shorthand for a more powerful and hybrid agenda. It draws not only on modern scientific archaeology, but on the anthropology of material culture, landscape, and identity, as well as aspects of military and cultural history, geography, and museum, heritage, and tourism studies. All or some of these can inform different aspects of research, but none are overly privileged. The challenge posed by modern conflict demands a coherent, integrated, sensitized yet muscular response in order to capture as many different kinds of information and insight as possible by exploring the ‘social lives’ of war objects through the changing values and attitudes attached to them over time.

This series originates in this new engagement with modern conflict, and seeks to bring the extraordinary range of latest research to a passionate and informed general readership. The aim is to investigate and understand arguably the most powerful force to have shaped our world during the last century – modern industrialized conflict in its myriad shapes and guises, and in its enduring and volatile legacies.

THIS BOOK

The First World War was precisely that – a global conflict fought in all of the world’s physical spaces, in the air, at sea, on land, and - as Matthew Leonard shows us in this meticulously researched book - in the dark, airless and lethal depths beneath the infamous battle-zones of the Western Front in France and Belgium.

The subterranean war which Leonard explores is as unsettling and alien as it is unknown to the majority of those with an interest in the First World War. Yet underground fighting was an integral part of the conflict, linked to the deathly struggles on the surface, albeit endured by far fewer men. All along the old Western Front today are the hidden remains of conflict below ground. Unlike the rolling countryside above, where time and society has softened the scars of war, or re-packaged the battlefields for heritage and tourism, the visceral places of 1914-18 survive just a few metres below. It is as if there were two wars, one tamed and altered and accessible to today’s visitors and researchers, the other a jagged, uncomfortable, and sometimes lethal entity, lurking surreally in tunnels, caverns, and passages beneath – and for the most part inaccessible, and often unexplored. Many certainly still remain to be discovered. In recent years, several of these subterranean places have been opened to the public, providing a glimpse into the past, but mainly there is a vast underground universe where the clock has stopped and only a few have ever ventured within.

During the war, the surface and subterranean worlds shared primeval conditions created by the modern technology of high explosives. Death and injury could arrive unannounced, comrades manning trenches disappeared in an instant, atomised into nothingness. Yet underground, there was a unique challenge to human senses – men gasped in suffocating space, and developed new sensitivities of smell, sound, and touch in conditions where human vision was often of little avail. Deprived of sight, sound became a dominant feature of the subterranean war experience. Not the fury of artillery and aerial bombardment which dominated the surface fighting, but a deadly quiet, where hearing and recognising faint noises, characteristic sounds, and silence itself, could be the difference between life and death. Men had to re-learn the world, how to move, how to communicate, how to survive.

Yet there was also a deeper, metaphysical dimension lying behind the military formalities of battle plans, digging tunnels, laying charges, hanging gas curtains, and clay-kicking. Tunnellers of the First World War, and those that accompanied them underground were entering a dark realm of myth and spirits locked into human consciousness and beliefs from time immemorial. The First World War may have been the world’s first industrialised global conflict – a harbinger of modern ways of killing – but it was no less ‘ancient’ and unnerving in some of its landscapes and places – especially those below the surface. Regardless of race, nation, ethnicity or religious belief, underground was most often regarded as a place for the dead, not the living. In one of the curious yet lethal realities of the First World War, where the world was literally, as well as metaphorically, turned upside down, soldiers were safer beneath the surface than on it. Hell, it seemed, had been moved by war from the subterranean depths to the world above; yet the doubts still remained – millennia of human beliefs about the denizens of the underworld could not so easily be shaken off.

And then there are the traces of humanity which the underground worlds of war have preserved, in sometimes astonishing detail and variety. Many of the places explored in this book have been sealed from everyday life for a hundred years – and have served as time capsules of a century-old war. Graffiti and carvings capture a moment in time, and an individual’s response to it. Sometimes they are memorials, perhaps the last written comment or artistic flourish of a life about to be cut short. Documenting and analysing these marks today is anthropology and archaeology as much as it is history, and moves the study of these signs of war beyond mere recording, and into the realm of emotion and memory – freeze-framing a human life in time, and sometimes too connecting to real people through identifying the maker and perhaps tracing living relatives as well. There is an intensely human satisfaction in making such visceral connections between the living and the dead, and in a sense returning ancestors to the present even if only fleetingly.

Compared to a century of historical research, and innumerable books concerned with the military history of the First World War, the extent and nature of the underground war is largely unknown to the public. It is a feature of the author’s own research underground as well as in libraries and archives that he can bring academic rigour, personal experience and an interdisciplinary approach to the subject.

Here is a voice of authority which comes from having shared the subterranean world with the ghosts of those who fought, suffered, and died there a hundred years ago. The author’s contribution here is all the more incisive and boundary-pushing because it is embedded in the wealth of experience and insight provided by the Durand Group of underground war specialists, of which he is a member, and which has spent decades exploring and researching these places beneath the Western Front, quietly, professionally, and without fanfare. There is no glory-seeking amateurism here, nor chasing of television cameras – only a serious respect for people, places, knowledge and understanding. It is this combination of qualities which makes this book such a valuable and insightful guide not just to the harsh physical realities of the underground war, but to the new and unexpected dimensions which these men encountered, and to which they had to adapt, first to survive, and then to carry out their duties. The author’s achievement is to guide us in through these new experiential places, on a voyage to the nether worlds of the Great War for Civilization, and to bring us back transformed.

Nicholas J Saunders,

University of Bristol, July 2016

The Western Front 1914-1918

Introduction

This book tells the hidden story of subterranean warfare on the Western Front, discussing the existential realties of being underground in a modern war. How did this new environment affect the human psyche or the ability to prosecute the war? How did these worlds feel, smell, taste and sound? These questions are answered through the melding of disciplines, by engaging anthropological theories with archaeological fieldwork – through a modern interdisciplinary approach to the material culture of twentieth century conflict.

Much of the research for this book is taken from my own fieldwork, a great deal of which has been conducted with my Durand Group colleagues. The subterranean worlds of the Western Front offer a chance to experience some of the last remaining visceral and untouched landscapes of the conflict. They are rich in material culture, and without the ability to spend extended periods of time in these places it would not have been possible to approach the underground war in such a holistic manner.

A hundred years after its beginning the First World War is still a conflict that most find difficult to comprehend. The common idiom portrays the years between 1914 and 1918 as a slaughter, and often a callous one at that. The few strips of grainy film