Home comforts in the tunnels, Hill 60

The 1st Australian Tunnelling Company was tasked with protecting the mighty Hill 60 explosive mine from the hundreds of German tunnellers who dug furiously trying to find it. For seven months prior to the mine’s detonation, the Australians lived and worked in silence, amidst cramped tunnel systems, countermining and undermining German saps.

The circumstances were bearable to what they would be in the line, but fatigue even here, to the unlucky forced to spend a night in the bad spots of the tunnels, is a circumstance the aching misery of which cannot be judged by any standard with which our average civilian is conversant.

Will Dyson, 1917