Arras tunnels: Inside the secret WWI city built by New Zealand troops. Photo / Unsplash
Beneath the charming French town of Arras lies a secret wartime city created by New Zealanders. Marian McGuinness descends into the subterranean world of Carriere Wellington, the Wellington Quarry, to learn its Kiwi legacy.
On Easter Sunday 1917, 24,000 Allied soldiers crammed into the netherworld of tunnels beneath the city of Arras in Northern France. They were metres from the German front line.
At an improvised altar lit by candles resting on grey limestone pillars, and before a crucifix carved into the wall, they attended the Mass of the Resurrection and prayed for those about to pass from life to death.
Battlefield tours of the Somme and Passchendaele are undertaken with a sense of gravity, and I find myself in Arras, strategically poised in 1917 between two warring zones on the Western Front. Arras, once reduced to rubble, has since been rebuilt with elegant squares and arcades of cafes, all framed by Flemish-style gabled homes.
I’m here to explore one of its lesser-known stories, the remarkable subterranean world of Carriere Wellington, the Wellington Quarry, and its Kiwi legacy.
During the Middle Ages, a soft limestone called chalk was mined beneath Arras to build the town above. The resulting tunnels, known as boves, became storage cellars for wine and produce merchants. Centuries later, during World War I, the nearby 15km German front was gridlocked with barbed wire, machine gun nests and concrete bunkers.
With thousands of soldiers dying every day and the front line stalled for weeks, the Allied commanders decided their best chance of a breakthrough would come from underground. They would build “the secret city of Arras”. The forgotten tunnels took on a new purpose and became part of one of the war’s most renowned surprise attacks.
To undertake such an arduous task, the New Zealand Tunnelling Company and the Māori Pioneer Battalion were called upon for their expertise. The tunnels had to be wide enough for soldiers to march in one direction while stretcher-bearers passed in the other. The excavated rock had to be carefully dispersed to ensure that German aircraft would not detect it.
Excavating 80m a day, and leaving stone pillars to secure the ceilings, the 500 tunnellers used pickaxes to link the quarries into a 24km pathway beneath no-man’s land to within a few metres of the German trenches.
The labyrinth was transformed into a subterranean city with all the essentials: electricity, running water, supply railway, kitchens, latrines, a 700-bed hospital, an operating theatre and a morgue.
The soldiers entered the underground network through cellars in the town. They would walk miles to their positions where they would wait for days.
The tunnels were sealed at the end of World War II, a closing of war wounds, perhaps. They were rediscovered in 1990 and reopened in 2008.
After a 20-minute walk from the centre of town, I join a guided tour of this secret city, entering through its museum. In glass display cases, the artefacts of life underground connect us to the men who lived there: toothbrushes, canteens, cigarette tins, pipes, mirrors and moustache combs, among other ephemera.
One photograph shows a tunneller wearing a personal respirator. He is carrying a small wire cage that would have held a bird or mouse, early sentinels against poisonous gases and toxic fumes. At his feet lie the tools of his trade, a pickaxe and drill.
There’s a reproduction of an inscription found carved in one of the tunnels.
“S. Issac NZ MAORI 15/1033 [service number] 24 February 1917”. Beneath his inscription is a conch shell he had brought with him and decided to leave in the tunnel. A tactile reminder of home.
Our group is kitted out with tin helmets and headsets for the 20m descent in a glass lift to the cavern floor.
In muted light, a wall projection of a World War I map orients us to our position beneath Arras. Nearby, another image appears of four uniformed tunnellers sitting with their arms crossed. They look at us like ghosts and it feels as though I’ve entered a time capsule.
The Kiwis, nicknamed “Lemon Squeezers” for the distinctive shape of their hats, labelled the tunnels they excavated with the names of home. Roughly printed in black against the grey limestone and to aid navigation through the labyrinth, are Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, all the way to Dunedin.
There’s a midden of Super Creme Toffee tins, rusted red tins of Turnwright’s Toffee De-light, and discarded stone rum flagons, remnants of life on the Western Front.
The words of war poet Wilfred Owen are heard in a voiceover, “The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells ...” Images of soldiers appear on the walls. “Each man had his own war,” comes another voiceover as we enter the sobering last hours of Private Harry Holland.
We pause at more graffiti. Engraved into the candle soot on a wall are the words “Toi Karini from Tolaga Bay NZ”. There’s poignancy in a crucifix scratched into the wall. “The carver had just been in a bloodbath above ground,” our guide tells us. Further along, there’s a sketch of a beautiful young woman in a hat and V-neck dress. She is looking wistfully into the distance and I wonder who was drawing the face of his sweetheart.
There are moments of humour as the word “latrine” comically points to two rusty buckets beneath holes in a wooden bench. Our guide tells us that at night the buckets would be emptied near the German line.
In this moment of lightness, we’re told about a contingent of Scottish soldiers. In the warmer months, they would go swimming and leave their kilts on the grass. A group of passing women saw the skirts, mistook the swimmers for fellow bathers and undressed to join them, much to the delight of the Scotsmen.
Further along in the Waitomo cave, where the tunnellers stored wooden props, a satirical sign reads, “Housekeeper required”. Beyond it, an unknown hand has framed the words “Kia Ora NZ” with silver ferns.
The laughter quietens when we come to No 10 EXIT. The reality is grey and chilling. A dozen roughly hewn stairs rise before us, then veer left, through an arched exit. There are discarded helmets and stone flagons. We hear shellfire. I shudder at the incessant thumps and bangs. Beyond the exit was no man’s land and its apocalypse of icy sleet, blown fields and bodies.
“On Easter Monday morning these young boys stepped up and out into hell,” says our guide. “What did they think before they died?”
Projected images on the walls show the boys writing their last letters home. Private Harry Holland wrote, “Kiss our Harry for me. When I see him again, it will take me all my time to catch him.”
We then see the men projected in shadow, armed with bayoneted rifles, as gunfire and the wailing sounds of war echo down No 10 Exit.
Private Harry Holland didn’t survive the day.
Ninety minutes after we began our tour, our group emerged from the dark in a camaraderie of stillness and silence.
Even though the Battle of Arras was a tactical success in pushing the German line back 11km, the offensive was called off when casualties reached 4000 a day.
The war continued its murderous slaughter, but the subterranean network, thanks to the New Zealand tunnellers, became a triumph of engineering and ingenuity.
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