Vauquois

You, the others, who are not here and who will come later, you will never understand…you will be like strangers and enemies, you will not know what it means, the mine in the west, at Vauquois, the mine of 14 May 1916, or how Death towers alive over mankind. (Lieutenant André Pézard, 46th Infantry Regiment)¹⁵

In 1914, the village of Vauquois sat on a plateau on a ridge, the Butte de Vauquois, 289m above sea level. The value of the ridge for observation led to fierce fighting over its possession in the winter of 1914. As at Les Éparges, mining began owing to the value of the position and escalated to the extent that it seemed to have become an end in itself, despite attempts by commanders to control it. Between March 1915 and April 1918 there were 519 mines or camouflets blown at Vauquois, within an area of front 464m wide and 340m deep. The French launched an attack on 17 February 1915, corresponding to that of Les Éparges, supported by six mines of 25 to 50kg. Half of these failed to explode, however, and over the following weeks the French slowly pushed on to the summit through the remains of the village. This fighting resulted in a situation which encouraged further mining, as the lines were too close together for the French to use artillery to render the plateau untenable to the Germans. This was possibly a deliberate policy on the part of the Germans, as by allowing the French partial occupation they retained their observation but made it harder for the French to dislodge them.

In March the 1st Company of the 30th Rhineland Pioneers (1/Pi 30), a regiment created from a pre-war fortress battalion, began mining from the house cellars, which the French become aware of and began defensive galleries. Both sides soon reached the sandstone, called gaize, which forms the bulk of the ridge. This was very hard and could only be worked by picking, but had the advantage that in its unblown state it did not require timbering. French engineers of Company 5/1 sank shafts to 3.60 and 4m and began rameaux de combat 0.80m high by 0.60m wide. Initially they advanced these untimbered but, as they neared the Germans, timbered them according to their regulations. By mid-April the French had nine shafts running from their front line, but these were vulnerable to German rifle grenades and even hand grenades and also caused congestion in the trenches. In early May the French attempted another assault, supported by a mine to be fired five minutes before the infantry attack. However, the powder had become damp and failed to break surface. The French gained a foothold in German positions in the west but the main attack in the east failed.¹⁶

The advance of the German miners led the French to fire two small camouflets of 30kg cheddite on 13 May in an attempt to forestall them. On the same night the Germans broke through the roof of a shallow French gallery after sinking a shaft in no man’s land, surprising the miners at work with pistol fire and also, reportedly, asphyxiating grenades. The French were driven from the gallery and Corporal Menges, leading the patrol, jumped in and loaded a charge of 100kg, which destroyed it. The French used their intact galleries over the next few days to blow four mines and a camouflet, destroying German positions in the front line and also those German tunnels approaching their own lines. By doing so, however, they revealed the location of their own galleries. The Germans were able to resume their advance and fired three powerful charges close to the French front line.

The French responded in June by starting work on a stronger system of defences based on shafts every 15 to 20m along the whole 400m front, with the aim of preventing any German tunnels reaching within 15m of their front line. These galleries gave the French a potential advantage, but the Germans responded with new galleries to a depth of 4m, started from their second line and again using house cellars. They achieved rapid progress through the sandstone with electric drills powered by a generator in Varennes mill behind their lines. The Germans also began to link their galleries with transversals, creating more powerful defensive systems, which the French at Vauquois almost never did. The network quickly grew. On 19 June the French broke into a German gallery but found it empty apart from a lantern, picks and shovels. On 22 August they discovered a void, which on investigation turned out to be a natural fault. However, in the light of his electric torch the officer suddenly saw a German in front of him and fired his pistol, seriously wounding him. A German gallery had also broken into the void. The French blew a charge to destroy it and hastily tamped their gallery. The Germans in their turn investigated the following day and blew camouflets of 475kg and 550kg.

Two additional French engineer companies, the 5/3 and 5/51, joined the 5/1 and, during summer 1915, the French appeared to have the advantage, blowing, in four months, 77 charges to 51 German. During 1915, two out of three charges broke surface, creating a mass of craters each of about 10m diameter. The infantry gave up trying to occupy these craters, which caused casualties with negligible advantage and proved impossible to hold. The opposing sides satisfied themselves with ‘crowning’ the crater lip nearest to their lines and connecting it by saps. The action of the mines rendered occupying the plateau increasingly difficult and the two sides concentrated more on attack underground as a means of destroying the enemy positions. In June 1915 this battle was conducted at 4-6m below ground, but by the end of the year was down to 15-20m. As each side attempted to dig beneath each new crater so the level gradually deepened and, as they worked through ground blown by earlier explosions, timbering became more necessary and pockets of gas a hazard. The Germans were frequently able to resume the underground advance more quickly than the French following a blow and this forced the French to fire their tunnels closer to their own shafts and even to destroy them in the process. From December 1915 explosive charges exceeded one tonne when the French Company 5/1 exploded a 1,300kg charge at E17, forming a crater 20m in diameter. On 22 February Company 5/3 blew a mine of 2,030kg. By this time, the French mine entrances were concealed in dugouts under the trench parapet to protect them from rifle grenades and mortars. Within the dugouts were housed hand-operated centrifugal fans, while at the bottom of each shaft was an area 2-3m in length to store filled sandbags of spoil, ready to tamp a charge laid at short notice.

Both sides also dug accommodation for their troops beneath or immediately behind the front lines. The Germans in particular excavated deep and extensive dugouts into the gaize, which enabled them to squeeze a defence system with first and second lines, and large numbers of infantry, into the narrow band of plateau between their front line and the steep side of the ridge. At the end of 1915 the Germans ceased using vertical shafts from the first or second line and had begun to use the sheer slope on their side of the ridge for a new series of galleries about 15m from the top of the ridge. They installed a 60cm gauge railway line in the galleries to remove spoil, which they tipped directly down the slope. In November 1915 they began deep flanking galleries on the east and west of the plateau at 25m depth. By using the rear slope they could easily pass beneath the craters to reach depths of 40m. The Germans also continued to blow charges from their shallow system on the flanks some way from the French lines, to make them believe that they were making little progress in these sectors. The French believed that sunken lanes on the east and west would enable them to detect German mining in the vicinity, but the new German galleries were far too deep to be heard from the surface.

The opening of the Verdun offensive increased the importance of Vauquois as an observation post and shortly afterward the Germans were to demonstrate their dominance by devastating the French positions above and below ground. On 3 March they detonated a mine on the eastern flank of the plateau of 16,500kg, which they had placed over 35m deep. The French had not detected this mine and three sappers were lost in a gallery and twelve infantry were missing in the posts:

I took the risk of crawling along the length of my first line. All the minor posts of the eastern extremity were blown up along with the communication trench; a whole corner of the Ridge disappeared in the void; the hole is 60 metres wide. It is almost unimaginable; the hill is sliced through, opened, in space... The first German line was blown away, it too; between it and us a crater opens which widens and grows deeper more and more towards the right. The depths of the broken ground are of a yellow and raw colour; an immense odour of mildew floats in the void. Over the whole of the top of the sunken lane and on the site of the minor posts there are accumulations of monstrous rocks, each one the size of a tomb. The lip of the crater is twenty metres wide, eight or ten metres thick. There we have a half-section buried alive, sealed in the ground, that neither the end of the war nor the flow of the centuries will ever convey to the military ossuaries. My men, my poor fellows, are in there crushed and contorted. And I do not yet know their names. And when we know them, no one will dare to make them public, and each family will imagine that a bullet passed, quickly and cleanly, through their dear one’s heart. (Lieutenant André Pézard, 46th Infantry Regiment)¹⁷

Four days afterwards noises of picking were heard near one of the buried posts and on 9 March, after six days underground, three men were rescued alive.

To retaliate, the French engineer command quickly prepared a strongly overcharged mine in the centre of the plateau. They were assisted by a technical section of the engineers from Versailles, the Service Électromécanique (SEM), with an experimental Bornet electric drill. This had to be carried in pieces more than 20m below ground and was powered by a generator installed in a dugout. The drill was capable of 15cm diameter bores of up to 50m in length, drilling at about 8 to 10m per hour. The principle was the same as the pre-war borers, but this device was capable of cutting through rock. At the end of the bore a small charge was exploded, disguised by blowing a charge in a neighbouring gallery or a bombardment on the surface, to create a cavity capable of holding a larger charge. This process was repeated several times until the cavity could hold 10 tonnes of explosive, which was inserted along the borehole. The French passed the bags by hand along the gallery so that the German listeners were not alerted by the sounds of explosives being dragged along the ground. The French were alone in continuing to use gunpowder for mining operations, which was both less powerful than ammonium nitrate explosives and also far more liable to explode accidentally. After 5 or 6 tonnes had been charged the atmosphere was laden with a highly dangerous mixture of explosive dust and, in the confined space of the gallery, probably set off by a candle, there was a violent explosion. The main charge, however, did not detonate and remarkably the French seem to have suffered no casualties. Listeners detected German activity in the vicinity and the French halted charging, immediately tamped and blew on 23 March. Most of the remains of Vauquois church were hurled into the air, about 60m of the German front line was destroyed and about 30m of the second line was damaged. Thirty German infantry disappeared. The French infantry occupied the southern lip of the crater, nearest their own line, but were forced back over the crater lip by German fire and counterattacks, which continued for the rest of the day. The lips were higher on the German side and the blow left them with improved observation over the French positions.