In the troglodyte war of the Western Front, both sides went beneath the battlefield.

Miners or moles, as the British had once called them, dug deep, long tunnels,

and almost on a daily basis fought their war underground.

I've often described the Great War on the Western Front as a troglodyte world.

Literally, troglodyte, that means people who live in caves.

But I think you get the analogy.

This was a war, a Tolkienesque war of darkness of men living beneath the battlefield,

underground, in trenches, in dugouts.

And it kind of adds something to the whole atmosphere of what trench warfare was about,

this war of trenches, a static war, where in places thousands of men lived along trench lines

that hardly ever, sometimes never changed. So no wonder it felt alien to so many of those who were there.

And nothing to me really symbolises that aspect of the Great War more than the war underground,

the war beneath those battlefields of the Western Front. As soon as the trenches were formed,

those with any kind of insight knew that this was essentially a siege war, but one on a previously

unimagined scale. And in previous siege wars, it wasn't uncommon for one side to besiege, say, a castle, tunnel beneath its walls and bring it down, allowing their troops to flood in.

But in France and Flanders the castles were trenches, and to bring them down, men had to tunnel deep under those

battlefields and lay charges of explosive. It became a side to the war that characterised those long

periods of static trench warfare, and particularly prevalent in those sectors where the front

didn't move much,

if at all. And today we see evidence of it with mine craters across the old front line,

from water-filled mine craters like Spambrook-Mohlen in Flanders, to the vast open chasm of

Loch Nogar on the Somme, to a hillside of craters where the village of

...