Episode 2 - Into the Earth: The War Beneath the War

This episode takes the listener fully underground, revealing the hidden battlefield beneath the Western Front and the reality of the tunnelling war that shaped both the conflict and Alphonsus (Albert) Joseph Edwards’ life. Set in France and Belgium in 1917–1918, it explores the unseen world of the Australian Tunnelling Companies - men recruited to dig, listen, counter-mine, and fight in total darkness beneath enemy lines.

Through sound design and narrative reconstruction, the episode explains how underground warfare worked: the silent excavation of galleries, the placement of massive explosive charges, the constant listening for enemy tunnellers, and the brutal close-quarters encounters that occurred when opposing tunnels met. It shows how tunnellers lived and worked in airless, unstable conditions where collapse, flooding, gas, or sudden explosion could strike without warning.

Personal stories anchor this broader history. Alongside Albert, listeners meet fellow tunnellers such as the teenage sapper Lyle Ranger and others whose service - and deaths - illustrate the human cost of this subterranean war. The episode situates Albert within the aftermath of major actions like Messines and Hill 60, explaining how the ground itself was reshaped by mining warfare and how tunnellers shifted from offensive mining to defensive and counter-mining operations as the war evolved.

Drawing on war diary entries, the episode recreates the psychological strain of listening for enemy activity underground: interpreting faint knocks, vibrations, and metallic taps that might signal an imminent counter-mine. It also examines the daily toll on the body - exhaustion, illness, lung damage - and why tunnellers were especially vulnerable to gas warfare, as poison vapours pooled in the low, confined spaces where they worked.

The episode culminates in the lead-up to Albert’s gas exposure in 1918 and the expanding role of tunnellers as the front moved, including clearing hidden mines and preventing catastrophic explosions in captured territory. Into the Earth reveals that the tunnelling war was not only about destroying the enemy, but about survival, endurance, and engineering skill under extreme pressure - setting the stage for the personal consequences Albert would face in the episodes to come.