Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command of The Royal Canadian Legion www.ns.legion.ca 49 continued ... A Mi’kmaq Tunneller's Story - Sgt Sam Glode, DCM continued ... run along the trench away from every shell burst. Then another shell would burst near us and we would run down the trench again. Some fellows got hit and they hollered and there was a lot of blood. Everybody said it was my fault for shooting at the plane. But I said I didn't hit it. Anyhow, I didn't shoot at planes after that. The next day our bunch was sent along a communication trench to a place behind the rise where the frontline trenches were. This was the place where the engineer officers had decided to begin a tunnel to the German lines. From the Canadian front-line the ground sloped down to no-man’s land, so we had to go down 80 feet straight before we could start the drift tunnel towards the ridge. It was all pick and shovel work, mostly in hard blue clay. At night we took the clay out of the shaft in sacks and dumped it in a ravine back of the reserve trench, and there was net camouflage over the ravine to keep the German airplanes from seeing what we were doing. But the Germans knew just the same. There was another bunch of Canadian tunnellers on our right, digging a shaft at a place called The Bluff. The Germans dug a tunnel of their own to it and blew it in with dynamite. It blew up about 300 feet of the Canadian front line trench as well and left a big crater. By this time, I was a corporal, and one morning the sergeant left me in charge of the section working in the tunnel. We had got the tunnel dug pretty well under no-man’s land. Two or three men worked with picks and shovels at the "face," and the rest worked at timbering the sides and roof. About 20 men in all. An iron pipe brought fresh air to us, driven by a fan in the vertical shaft behind the Canadian front line. We knew the Germans were tunneling. We had a man with a listening outfit. On this particular day, all of a sudden, he said, "Say, the Germans have stopped working," We stopped for a while ourselves, wondering what that meant. Nothing happened. Finally, we went on with the work. I was sitting on a ledge in the tunnel, watching the men timbering up behind the diggers at the "face," All of a sudden everything went black. I felt like somebody had hit me on the head with a big club. I don't know how long I sat there like that. When I came to my senses I was wet with sweat and my ears were singing like a steam whistle was inside them. Our candles had gone out and I could hear some men stirring, but nobody spoke till I did. I called out the names of the ones that had been nearest to me, and they answered me, but their voices sounded queer. Timbering the tunnel sides and roof
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