![\"Mine-and-counter-mine--e1450277338397-768x1024\"](\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2015\/12\/mine-and-counter-mine-e1450277338397-768x1024.jpeg?w=620\")
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No one has done better than the great British comic illustrator Heath Robinson to illustrate the intrinsically reciprocal dynamic of military engineering in general and mining and countermining in particular. This cartoon is from a collection Heath Robinson at War<\/a>\u00a0I found in a rummage sale years ago\u2013no doubt there are abundant reprints.<\/p>\n I \u00a0would guess, though, that for many KOW readers the dominant mental image of war underground is more akin to that in Sebastian Faulks\u2019 novel Birdsong<\/a>, later adapted for television. The harrowing scenes of tunnel warfare beneath the trenches of the First World War are extraordinarily vivid. In his introduction Faulks described it as \u2018a hell within a hell<\/a>\u2018. For a lot of people, it seems to me on the sound scientific basis of a dozen or so conversations (some of them drunken), that\u2019s where tunnel warfare resides\u2013at a safe historic distance from today, a claustrophobic nightmare of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers.<\/p>\n Of course this is completely wrong. Tunnel warfare has been a constant in human history for as long as there have been humans making war. In recent memory it was a major preoccupation of the American military. Consider\u00a0the poem below written in praise of the massive tunnelling efforts of Vietnamese communists during the Vietnam War. I love it. (Can anyone tell me if the words \u2018your entrails, Mother, are unfathomable\u2019 rhyme in Vietnamese?) I found it in the front matter of the classic book The Tunnels of Cu Chi<\/a> by Tom Mangold and John Penycate.<\/p>\n