TRENCHES!

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 47, 18 June 1915, Page 5

TRENCHES!

THE BIGGEST DIGGING JOB SINCE CREATION. Every day of every- week for many months past we have been reading about trenhcos. "Trench "is, .at present, the commonest word in the English language, and from pictures and photographs we are as familiar with the look of trenches as we are with the sound of the word.

For all that, it is not likely that the average man has formed any real idea of the gigantic amount of digging which has been done up to date. The fronts along which the Germans and the Allies face one another from the North Sea to Switzerland is, roughly, 400 miles long. The opposing lines of the Russians and the Austro-Germans are fully 500 miles in length. Along these 900 miles of front, each army ha 3 dug itself in. ut this does not mean that there are only 1,800 miles of trenches. Each army, it must be remembered, has at least three lines of trenches, one behind the other, so that if the first in taken it has others to fall back upon. TRENCH ACROSS ATLANTIC OCEAN. We must, therefore, multiply 1,800 b> three, which gives us 0.4(H) miles, or a trench long enough to reach from Liverpool right across the Atlantic Ocean and the whole of the American Continent, ending up at San Franscisco. \\'e have not mentioned communication trenches through which forces rue brought forward in safety to the fire trenches. The length of these is not easy to estimate, but if we add another two miles for each mile of front we shall certainly be well on the safe side. This brings our estimate up to 7,200 miles, but we have not yet come nem* our total. In Belgium our enemies ha\o constructed at least another 600 miles oi trenches ready to oppose our advance, and no doubt another '2OO or more on the Rhine. We ourselves have dug about 300 miles of trenches in East Anglia to check a possible raid, and another 100 nnles or so along the Suez Canal. Around Cracow, Przemyzl, and other great fortresses in the Sast the ground is honeycombed for miles. Allow another 100 miles for these fortifiactions, and we bring our total to 8,500 miles, a distance about equal to the full breadth of Europe and Asia together. The average trench is six feet deep, and live feet wide at the top. Including traverses and dugouts, you may put it that two cubic yards of earth have been removed for every yard of trench dug.

MILLIONS OF TONS OF EARTH

Take it that .a cubic yard of earth weighs a ton. aucl von have the result taht over 39,000,000 tons of wfrth have been shifted during the past eight months. This, of course, conveys little to the mind. Let us try to make it clear. Many have seen Plymouth breakwater, that great artificial island of .stone which makes a harbour of the open roadstead. It is over a mile long. It stands in water over fifty fwt deep. It took thirty years to build. Yet it contains only about one-eighth part as much material as has been removed to make trenches in the present war. The new Dover breakwater tif-ed up over 3,500,000 tons of graaito and '2,500,000 of concrete. The amount oi earth and rock excavated for trenches is nearly five times as great. The average load of a big construction train, such as used in tho cutting of the-Panama Canal, is 600 tons. Nearly G.OOO fiuch trains would be needed 10 haul away the earth dug out by soluieisince the war began. In all the word there are only a little more than doub.o that number of locomotives. To cut the Panama Canal took thirteen years and cost over £17,000,000. The water is thirty-ono feet deep, and the length of the canal about ninety miles Yet the total bulk of soil move,) was only about half a* much again as that .shifted by the armies that have dug themsilves in since last August. Remember, too. that this (lining ingoing on all the time. Kvery day settle completion oi" iresh mile.sot trendies. ll' the war goes on another sin months, even the record of that <:vmendous ditch through the Istbniii- ■ ) Panama will be left i:'.r behina. g&itv. ___