The Great War, as every schoolchild knows, was a Good Thing for nobody, and a particularly Bad Thing for the several million people who were required to stand in extremely muddy trenches in France and Belgium while having large metal objects shot at them.
The correct response to this, it was eventually decided, was to go further underground. And it was here that the New Zealand Tunnellers did their bit, which was an unusually dirty, dark, and dangerous bit, even by the generous standards of 1916.
The Western Front was essentially a 400-mile-long stalemate where both sides repeatedly sent men across open ground toward machine gun positions, which went exactly as well as you'd expect. Generals in châteaux miles behind the lines kept ordering attacks, confident that the next one would achieve the breakthrough, despite the previous fifty attacks having achieved nothing except casualty lists that read like phone directories (see the documentary Blackadder Goes Forth for further details).
The tunnellers arrived at The Front near Arras in northern France, a town whose chalky subsoil proved extremely dig-through-able. The idea was to dig underneath the German trenches and plant explosives. They were assigned to the L sector, which sounds reassuringly alphabetical and organised. In practice, it was a stretch of ground where men with spikes on their helmets were busily digging tunnels toward them with equally patriotic enthusiasm and large amounts of explosives. The whole enterprise resembled an extremely high-stakes game of chess, except that the pawns were men with shovels and the board was liable to explode.
The New Zealanders, for the most part being miners, adapted to this role with considerable speed. Most officers and men were rotated through Mine School, where one trusts they received instruction in the finer points of not accidentally blowing themselves up. The remainder began actual operations, which in the circumstances showed either great courage or a comprehensive misunderstanding of what Mine School was for.
The Germans, who had been doing this sort of thing longer and were consequently rather good at it, wasted no time in making their feelings known. They fired a mine almost immediately upon the New Zealanders’ arrival in the new sector. Fortunately, nobody was killed.
In early June 1916, the Germans detonated four more mines and succeeded in destroying part of the British front line, creating three large craters named Cuthbert, Clarence, and Claude. That the British Army chose to name enormous holes in the earth blasted by enemy explosives after a cheerful folk song says something profound about the national character, though it is not entirely clear what.
After this excitement, underground warfare settled into a relatively quiet phase, which in the context of the Western Front means nobody was being blown up on a daily basis. The geology, weakened by all the explosions, made further mining difficult, and the Germans thoughtfully retreated along much of the New Zealand sector. By October 1916 the Tunnellers had been reassigned to new duties in preparation for the Battle of Arras. They had dug, they had listened for Germans digging, they had occasionally withdrawn, and they had survived. In the context of the Great War, this constituted a result of which anyone might be justifiably proud.