German Trench Architecture

Progress, Volume XII, Issue 6, 1 February 1917, Page 869

German Trench Architecture

From the English “ Architectural Review." During the past month the Press Bureau has put at the disposal of the Press a most interesting article on German trench architecture, written after the “Great Advance” had revealed the remarkable underground constructions of the enemy. There is no indication as to who was the author, but from the manner of his description we may assume him to be an architect-officer with the Army in France. The article has already appeared in some of the newspapers, but it merits the Avidest possible publicity, and we therefore take occasion to republish it, with accompanying illustrations, not only as a matter of present interest, but also as a documentary record for future reference.

Their parapet makes more show of rough clay or chalk, even where a light layer of this covers two or more feet of reinforced concrete placed like a shrapnel helmet on the head of a dug-out or a gun emplacement. And if you now leave your first standpoint and explore the two trenches in turn, and also the support and communication trenches behind each of them, you find that the difference goes, in more than one sense, deeper still. The Allied trench looks, in every way, like the work of men who hoped and meant to move on before long; the German trench looks like the work of men who hoped, or feared, that they would be in it for years. Our trench housing has been much more of a makeshift, a sort of camping out, with some ingenious provisions for shelter and comfort, but not more than the least that would serve. Most of our dug-

Along many miles of the Western front, as it was till the end of June, you can now do what seems to trench-dwellers almost the utmost reach of impossibility is to say, you can stand at your ease in the middle of No man’s Land and look at a German front trench on your right and a French or British front trench on your left. As soon as you do so you feel that the outward face of each wears a quite different expression. It is not merely the accident that the Allies’ wire is only cut across by neat lanes or gangways at convenient intervals while the German wire lies in a trampled mess on the ground. The difference goes much further. For one thing, the Allies support their barbed wire mainly with wooden stakes; the Germans do it with iron. For another, the Allies’ parapet owes much more of its strength to visible sandbags. The Germans build with sand-bags too, but not so much nor so openly.

outs are just roughly delved holes in the earth with only enough props and rafters to hold the roofs up; their floors are bare ground with a little straw on it; their doors, if they have any, are a few odd pieces of plank with a couple of other pieces nailed across; often the floor is on the trench level, to save burrowing. Lighting is done with candles, mostly bought at the canteen, and if anyone owns an armchair or a two-foot-high mirror, it is the jest of the platoon. The whole German idea of trench life is different. The German front in the West is like one huge straggling village built of wood and strung out along a road 300 miles long. Of course, the houses are all underground. Still, they are houses, of one or two floors, built to certain official designs, drawn out in section and plan. The main entrance from the trench level is, sometimes at any rate, through a steel door, of a pattern apparently standardized, so

that hundreds may come from the factory on one order and missing parts be easily replaced. The profusely timbered doorway is made to their measure. Outside this front door you may find a perforated sheet of metal, to serve for a doormat or scraper. -Inside, a flight of from twelve to thirty-six stairs leads down at an easy angle. The treads of the stairs and the descending roof of the staircase are formed of mining frames of stout timber, with double top sills ; the Avails are of thick planks notched at the top and bottom to fit the frames, and

strengthened Avith iron tie-rods running from top

section of a platoon had its allotted places for messing and sleeping, its oAvn place for parade in a passage, and its own emergency exit to the trench. In another, used as a dressing station, there are beds for thirty-two patients and a fair-sized operating room. A third, near Mametz, Avas designed to house a Avhole company of 300 men, Avith the needful kitchens, provision and munition storerooms, a avoll, a forge riveted Avith sheets of cast iron, an engineroom, and a motor-room : many of the captured dugouts were thus lighted by electricity. In the officers’ quarters there have been found full-length mirrors,

to bottom of the stairs and Avith thick Avooden struts at right angles to these. At the foot of the stairs a tunnelled corridor runs straight forward for anything up to fifty yards, and out of this open rooms and minor passages on each side. In many dug-outs a second staircase, or two staircases, lead to a loAver floor, which may be 30 fefet or 40 feet beloAv the trench level.

All these staircases, passages, and rooms are, in the best specimens, completely lined Avith Avood, and as fully strengthened with it as the entrance staircase already described. In one typical dug-out each

comfortable bedsteads, cushioned armchairs, and some pictures, and one room is lined with glazed “sanitary” wallpaper. Other German trench works show the same lavish use of labour as the dug-outs. In the old German' front trench south of La Boisselle an entrance like that of a dug-out leads to a flight of twenty-four stairs, all' well finished. At their foot a landing 3 feet square opens on its farther side upon a nearly vertical ' shaft. Descending this by a ladder of thirty-two rungs you find a second landing like the first, opening on a continuation of the shaft. Down

this a ladder of sixty rungs brings you to the starting point of an almost straight level tunnel 3 feet wide and about 5 feet high, cut for fifty-six paces through pure hard chalk. It ends in a blank wall. If you take its bearings with the compass, return to the parapet, and step fifty paces in the same direction as the tunnel, you find yourself in a huge crater, which had evidently been held, and probably made, by British troops. So that, at the moment of the advance in July, nothing remained, presumably, for the Germans to do but to bring the necessary tons of high explosive to the end of their tunnel and blow the mine under the base of the old crater. Some rungs of the ladders in the shafts are missing or broken, but as a whole the shafts and the tunnel are remarkable for amplitude and finish. Like an incomplete dug-out near Fricourt, this mine still contains parts of the machinery used for winding up the excavated chalk to the surface.

Nobody who reads this should leap to the conclusion that, simply because German trench work is more elaborate than ours, it is a better means to its end—the winning of the War. No doubt the size and the overhead strength of German dug-outs keep down casualties under bombardment, and sometimes enable the Germans to bring up unsuspected forces to harass our troops in the rear with machine-gun and rifle fire when a charge has carried our men past an uncleared dug-out of the kind. On the other hand, if our advance is made good, every German left in such a dug-out will be either a dead man or a prisoner. No , doubt, again, the German dug-outs give more protection from very bad weather than ours. But they also remove men more from the open air, and there is nothing to show that the half-buried German army gains more by relative immunity from rheumatism and bronchitis than it loses in the way of general health and vitality. In England troops have better health in tents than in huts, and better health in huts than in billets. For a man of sound constitution “exposure” often means something unpleasant rather than unhealthy, and it would not be surprising if the close underground villages of the Germans yielded higher figures of general sickness than our own simpler, shallower, and more airy trench shelters.