A Sapper’s Sacrifice - William Hackett, VC (1873-1916)
“I am a tunneler, and I must look after the others first.”
The Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for courage, originally was meant to be inscribed “For the Brave”. But bravery is not the exclusive preserve of the decorated: all soldiers who go into battle are worthy of that epithet. They chose instead “For Valour”. The VC is awarded to the exceptional, for the rare breed who go beyond duty and exemplify the finest qualities of the human spirit, courage in the face of all odds, selflessness, and sacrifice.
More than half of the Victoria Crosses awarded since the decoration was instituted in 1856 went to soldiers of the Great War. Many were awarded to soldiers who did not flinch in the face of certain death; one in four VC’s were awarded posthumously. But heroism comes in many flavors, and combat is not a prerequisite for indomitable courage. Doctors risked life and limb to save others, sailors to save their ships. But at least most of these missions had a chance of success. Not so with William Hackett: the only point to his sacrifice was to spare another man a solitary end.
When the Western Front became a war of trenches, those who already knew who to dig gained vital importance to armies. Britain had the fortune to be able to draw on the engineers and mines who had been the backbone of the Industrial Revolution, men like William Hackett. Born in Nottingham in 1873, William Hackett had almost no education, but this was not a barrier to work in England’s rich mining country. Forty-one years old and with a heart condition when the war broke out, Hackett seemed an unlikely soldier, but soon the call went up for men with digging experience. Twenty years of mining thus soon saw Hackett in uniform in France as part of 254 Tunneling Company.
Sappers like Hackett tunneled underneath German trenches and blew them up from below with tons of dynamite. It was grim and dangerous work. Cave-ins threatened to bury men alive, while the Germans used poison gas and mines of their own to kill British sappers. Sometimes British and German miners would dig by accident or design into one anothers’ mines, and fight at close-quarters in the pitch black and cramped tunnels.
Early in 1916 misfortune befell Hackett’s family when his 14-year-old son, who had followed his father’s career, had a severe mining accident which resulted in the amputation of his legs. “It’s very hard for me to be in this foreign land and have a lad placed in hospital,” dictated Hackett to a literate friend. He looked forward to a period of leave when he could see his beloved family again.
Unfortunately, as 254 Tunneling Company was on a digging mission under Givenchy, France, on July 27, 1916 a German mine went off under their tunnel, threatening a cave-in. Hackett and his four man squad faced the prospect of being entombed alive under the earth. Only one shaft lead back up to survival, but it was so tight and narrow the men could only go one at a time. Three made it back up, leaving Hackett and 22-year-old Thomas Collins, a Welsh sapper who had been dangerously wounded in the explosion.
Collins could not move, and the two men could feel the ground shifting beneath them. Every second they stayed dimished their chance of survival, for the shaft outside would soon cave-in too. Hackett knew he could not save Collins in time, but still he would not go. His staying would not make a jot of difference other than sparing Collins a dreadful death in isolation. “I am a tunneler,” he called outside to his waiting company, “I must look after the others first.” The inevitable collapse came soon after, sealing the gallery and the two men’s fate.
Hackett’s friends wrote home to his widow, although the censors meant she could not learn the reason for her husband’s death until after the war. Alice Hackett bore the loss stoically and was not surprised to learn that William had acted as he did. He is the only tunneler to have won the Victoria Cross.
“I can imagine what he would think when he was down in the mine where he met his death,” Alice Hackett told a newspaper after the war, “He would think when he heard that another poor fellow was fastened up in there: ‘What would my feelings be if I was lying helpless and nobody would stay with me? I must go to him, even if we both go under.”
