Something original?

Also, an underground drill that people can fit inside of. When it pops up, guns start shooting in every direction and Space Marines - sorry, Germans, come running out. It would be called the subterran.

I could see this possibly happening if the underground tunneling skirmishes got more intense. We had the underground action at Hill 60 in World War I, where the 1st Australian Tunneling Company laid huge mines beneath the German troop concentration there. Perhaps someone has the idea to swap this attack, or follow up the attack, with underground troop-carrying drills popping out behind lines to wreak havoc.

If you have enough of them, and they're big enough to transport horses (god knows how you keep the horse calm, though) you might find the Western powers attempting some kind of underground cavalry breakout. Now that's just asking to go horrifically, sadistically wrong.

If you made them smaller you might have some kind of 'underground torpedo' used to pass under the battlefields and explode, with timers, under enemy trenches. It sounds woefully inaccurate and failure-prone and therefore fits in perfectly with WWI tech.
 
There's no technical reason why you couldn't dig a far larger tunnel, the Greathead shield was 1880 and that's basically all you need for a modern tunnel boring machine.

That's not to say it's practical though. You'd have to go far deeper than the OTL trench miners went, you may still be vulnerable to people listening out for your excavation (you will be deeper, but you will also be noisier), you'll have to start from further back to avoid detection and you'll need some quiet discreet place (middle of largish copse, something like that?) to emerge on the other side. Plus it may take months, maybe years, depending on how far it is from your launch point to the emergence point, assuming of course your opponent has kindly left you one.

So not ASB, it is possible, but really really not a good idea. Maybe if one side accepts very early on in the war that no form of attack is possible against trenches, for some reason ignores tanks or attacks in other theatres and thinks the frontline wont move for years then maybe there is a tiny chance giant tunnels could happen. And then probably not work and end in disaster.
 
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