When people think of the First World War, one of the very
first images that come to mind
is of soldiers in the filthy muddy trenches, fighting, smoking, or just being
miserable. So today, here’s a
special episode of our show about the war in the trenches. I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
The first world war began and ended with a
great deal of movement and huge offensives, however it remains typified by its lack of movement
and the years of stalemate on the western
front, and the trenches were the front lines. But behind them were a mass of supply lines,
training establishments, storage, workshops, headquarters, and all the other essentials of war
where the majority of troops were employed. The idea of digging into the ground for protection
was not a new idea or unique to the Great War. It was, for
example, widespread in the US Civil War and the Russo-Japanese war.
Trench warfare in WWI began in September 1914 just after the battle of the
Marne, north of Paris. The
Germans pulled back to the Aisne River and dug into their positions; the French
and British followed suit.
What we saw over the following two months is
known as the race to the sea, as
trench lines grew and grew northward toward the channel and the North Sea as
each side tried to outflank the other to gain an advantage. By the end of November there was a continuous line of trenches between
Switzerland and the North Sea. At
first, the trenches were little more than foxholes or ditches, intended for
short battles. As the stalemate
continued, however, it became obvious that a more elaborate system was needed.
Now, although the specific construction of a
trench was determined by the local terrain, most were built according to the same basic design.
The front wall of the trench- the
parapet- averaged around ten feet high.
It was lined with sandbags from top to bottom,
and also had two to three more feet of
sandbags stacked above ground level. In parts of Italy, trenches were dug in rock, in Palestine in sand.
In France, the trenches ran through towns and villages, industrial works,
coalmines, brickyards, across railway tracks, through farms, fields and woods, across rivers, canals and
streams, and each feature presented
its own set of challenges for the men who had to dig in and defend.
The front line of a trench facing the enemy
was called the Main Fire Trench.
It’s not a straight line and is dug in sections, so if an artillery shell
explodes in one section, or
“bay“, only that section is affected. Behind that is another line called a support line. Here you find 'dugouts' cut into the side of the trench wall, often very small but with
room for perhaps three or four men to
squeeze in for shelter, or for a telephone position. Communications trenches linked the rear areas with
the forward lines, and it was along these that all men, equipment, and supplies were transported. Probing out from the front line were further trenches called 'saps', which often
went beyond the protective belts of barbed
wire and terminated somewhere in no-mans land in a listening post manned by one
or two infantrymen.
Now, the distance between enemy trenches
varied from as little as 30 to several hundred meters, and if you captured an enemy trench, you had a new
problem: how to turn it around as you now needed a protected front in what had been the enemy’s unprotected
rear. See? Soldiers were regularly rotated through a basic
trench cycle: fighting in the front line,
followed by time in the support lines, then being in reserve, then a rest period,
and the daily trench routine was something
like this: An hour before dawn,
those that were sleeping were woken to ‘stand to’. Everyone fixed bayonets and readied himself to guard against a dawn raid by the enemy.
Both sides carried out their respective ‘stand tos', and despite the
knowledge that each side was prepared, it was still at this time that many attacks were carried out.
As the light grew, this daily ritual was
accompanied by the ‘morning hate'. This
was when both sides relieved the
tension of the early hours with indiscriminate machine gun fire and shelling.
Following stand to, the men would have their breakfast and
clean their weapons. The
cleaning would be done in
shifts, though, with only a few of the men cleaning their weapons at
any one time. Then came the daily inspection. Weapons would be checked, as would the men's
clothing. This inspection would include a foot inspection for signs
of ‘trench foot'. Trench Foot
was a medical condition peculiar to trench life. It was a fungal infection of the feet caused by cold, wet, and unsanitary
trench conditions, and could turn gangrenous and result in amputation. Some 20,000 casualties from trench foot are said to
have been suffered by the
British Army by the end of 1914, although as trench conditions improved in 1915
it rapidly faded. Daily chores were then assigned. These could be filling the sandbags, repairing
duckboards, pumping out the
water that had gathered, digging latrines, and so forth. This was followed along the lines by the daily
boredom. Movement was restricted
in the trenches to what was
essential, so when men were not engaged in a specific chore they settled down
into time-killing activities; reading, writing
letters, maybe grabbing whatever sleep they could. In
the middle of war the boredom was often crushing. With the dusk came another round of ‘standing to’;
exactly the same procedure as at dawn, and with the onset of darkness, the men would be ordered to ‘stand
down' and the nights work of
re-supply, maintenance, and sentry duty would begin.
Sentry duty was never more than two hours as there was a real chance that a man
would fall asleep at his post[v], and
falling asleep on duty was considered to be such a serious offence that the
penalty was death by firing squad.
Night time also brought the need to patrol no
man's land, man listening posts, and send out wiring parties. Occasionally,
a patrol would meet an enemy patrol in the darkness and they would each be faced with the decision of
whether to fight or simply let the other pass. Such fighting,
though, would be hand-to-hand as gunfire would invite a burst from trench
machine guns. It has been estimated that up to one third of all
Allied casualties on the Western Front were actually sustained in the trenches. To the men serving in them death was a constant
companion, even when it was quiet, and death
came in many guises. In busy
sectors, the constant shellfire brought random death. Many shelling casualties were buried alive, and those who couldn’t be dug out suffered
a terrible death indeed. All
soldiers in the trenches also quickly learnt to curb their natural inclination
to peer over the parapet into No
Man's Land. To do so was to
invite a sniper's bullet.
Disease also took a heavy toll in the trenches, as you may
imagine, but no overview of life in the trench would be complete without mentioning the one overriding
feature that instantly struck
anyone visiting the lines - the appalling smell, which came from several
sources including: Rotting Flesh.
The dead could number in the thousands or even
tens of thousands. It was
often impossible to bury the dead immediately
following a battle and they would lie out in no man's land for days before they could be dealt with.
In addition, many died in shell holes that filled up with water or bodies simply
sank into the mud. The stench of
rotting flesh was a constant in
life in the trenches. Overflowing
Latrines. The men would try to
fill these in and dig new ones, but soon there was no room to dig new ones. Imagine how this was after four years.
The Stench of Humanity. Men who had not been afforded the luxury of a bath
in weeks or months would, of
course, smell. There was the
smell of disinfectant used to fight disease and infection, and the smells
of battle- cordite or the lingering hint of
poison gas.
The men on the lines actually grew used to this olfactory overload, but it would
overcome first-time visitors to
the front. There were also
millions and millions of rats. If
you’re wondering what the men ate, food for soldiers in the trenches during
World War one was at times a
luxury. Getting hot food from
the field kitchens to the front line
trenches could be impossible when a battle was imminent or in progress.
At the beginning of the war, soldiers got just
over a pound of meat each, the same in bread and a half-pound of vegetables each day, but by 1917 the
official ration was much smaller.
Fresh meat was getting harder to come by and
the ration was reduced to just 6
ounces of 'bully beef'. Common
foods were Maconochie stew and hard biscuits. All men received
the same rations, and the ranks were always fed before the officers, although
when able, the horses ate before
both. There was no official
vegetarian option, although provision was made for Indian personnel.
There was very little waste, and leftovers were sold as swill to local
farmers, while drippings were
saved for use in manufacturing explosives.
The key to success in the trenches was communication, and
the mainstay in communications was the runner who braved bullets and shells, mud and
mayhem, to take messages to and from forward positions. Although telephones were relatively commonplace, they relied on wires
that were easily cut by
shellfire or accident. A big use
for the telephone was from forward observation posts to spot for the artillery,
and it was not a happy soldier who was told,
in the face of shellfire and rifle bullets, to trace and repair breaks in the phone wires.
It was vital, though, for without instant
communication a commander was in an impossible
position. Radio was still a
fairly new medium, but the wireless advantage was obvious and it developed
rapidly throughout the war, becoming quite
sophisticated and common in the trenches by the end. Mud,
rats, bad food, disease, dead bodies, unbearable smells, artillery shells,
machine guns, no man’s land,
trench foot, and boredom. That,
ladies and gentlemen, is what life in the trenches was like. I
don’t know about you, but I find it hard to imagine anything worse than the filth, smell, and depression of the
trenches, with the constant threat of
sudden death, and the psychological effect on the soldiers of the war was
catastrophic. There is a
romantic notion of war, but you won’t find it here. I think I should read the poem over visual footage
of all that was rotten about the trenches.
The darkness crumbles away. It is the same old druid Time as ever,
only a live thing leaps my hand, A queer
sardonic rat, As I pull the
parapet’s poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan
sympathies. Now you have touched
this English hand You will do the same to a German Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the
sleeping green between. It seems
you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the
whims of murder, Sprawled in the
bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes at the shrieking iron
and flame Hurled through still
heavens? What quaver—what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe— just a little
white with the dust.
