The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-07-08
SAPPERS VITAL IN MODERN WARFARE AND ITS PROBLEMS Tricks Which Checkmate Enemy and Others Which
 Destroy Him PREPARING GREAT
 DITCHES OF BATTLE Building Traps in Which to Hold Germans Under the Fire of
 Machine Guns
By GILBERT sELDEs

London, June 21.-(Spec1al Corre- spondence. )-This is an article about "those d-d sappers." Their official name is royal engineers" They claim to date from William the Conqueror and to be very dignified, but whenever a job has to be done at the front and no one else can handle It. the word Is always. Leave 1t to those d-d sap pers." And always the sappers do the job.
 Next time you see a war film pay particular attention to the machinery, the transport columns, the wagons, trench tools barbed wire, telephones, water tanks. huts, plumbing Qf you get a chance to see any plumbing), signaling-everythin connected with physics and manual training and cleo tricity and chemistry.
 Perhaps you will see mine ex- ploded. There may be a raid and you may see a trench blown in. or per- haps group of men converting a cap tured trench so that 1t faces toward the Rhine instead of toward Paris. Stop to think of the men who are do- ing this work. They are the sappers.
 Dull job, you think? Not in the same class with the work done by the men who make midnight attacks, bay onet in hand, or who fight for their lives 10000 feet above the ground?
 Perhaps you are right. But Captain Tfmmy Wright probably did not think so. He won the Victoria cross for con- meeting up the lead which demolished a bridge at Mons and for getting a pontoon bridge in shape for the Fifth cavalry brigade at Vailly. He did both these things under fire and so had the V. c. before the war was four months old.
 Lance Corporal c. A. Jarvis, Fifty seventh field company, royal engineers, is another sapper who Justifiably thinks his work Is not dull. In the great retreat Jarvis was at Jemappes when the Germans tried to cross the canal under cover of their heaviest fire. For an hour and a half Lance Corporal Jarvis worked in the open exposed to a hurricane of machine gun and snipers' bullets. until he had fired every charge and demolished the only bridge the Germans could have used TFat was not specifically inglorious.
 For the most part the work of the royal engineers does not get itself into print, but 1t is the groundwork on which the whole army structure is based.
  gage in this work on the western front; in all probability 1t will send a special detachment of engineers to France to reorganize the railway sys- tems in reoccupied territory. It may also lay down railroads in Russia But wherever 1t works. the American en- gineering corps will surely cooperate with the British and will be able to learn much from the men who have hot potY me of every development of the war.
 VISIT TO SCHOOL
 Tn order to give Americans an idea of what work their engineers will be doing in the war I got permission re- gently to visit the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, the center from which all British military en- gincering radiates. Here in the barrack square once stood the engineers who went out with Wellington and worked at Waterloo In the bright red coat which we knew in the revolutionary war. Here, too. Lord Kitchener took his course in military engineering Tn 1871.
 Unlike the bayonet and bombing schools, the training center for engl- neering is not a war development. The officer er-instructors are descended from those who taught trench warfare in the time of the Crimean war and many of those now in charge Of the Aehool learned the technique of barbed wire in South Africa. The experience of the royal artificers who fought with Marlborough, of the engineers who made grenades in Napoleon's time, of those who went with the armies into India and Afghanistan, Is all at the service of the royal engineers today The instructors need only keep that Axnarfence ID-tO-date.
 At each recruiting center the School of Military Engineering keeps rep resentative who draws certain pro- portion of the recruits for the engi- neering corps. Every week fresh batch of men come to Chatham. After they have been attested, registered and properly clothe they are "trade-test- ed" Each man gives his trade wher he joins up; at the school he is ex- amined in this trade, and if he is really proficient he may look for 2 substantial increase in pay and for ar opportunity to use his talents. The chief trades represented in the shops at Chatham are steel, iron and wood '