Life in the trenches

The soldier of the First World War, especially on the Western Front, spent months in the trenches, but not without a break: units rotated through the front line every few days and spent the rest of their time in the support lines, in reserve and behind the lines. In the front line, life was shaped by dawn and dusk, work on the defences, mud, cold, rats and lice. Even in quiet weeks shellfire and snipers killed men, and the great battles cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The trenches became the symbol of the whole war, although in the east and in the Middle East the fighting was often very different.

How the trenches came about

At the start of the war armies marched and fought in the open. After the Battle of the Marne the Germans fell back to the heights above the Aisne and in September 1914 held them against the French and British. In the First Battle of the Aisne soldiers on both sides began to dig trenches, and on 15 September British headquarters ordered its troops to entrench. The war of movement on the Western Front was over.

Each side then tried to outflank the other to the north. In this Race to the Sea neither managed to turn the enemy’s flank, and by the middle of October 1914 the front had reached the North Sea. That autumn the Germans tried once more to break through at Ypres, but the Allies held the town. An unbroken front some 700 kilometres long now ran in the west from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Machine guns, quick-firing artillery and barbed-wire entanglements gave the defender such an advantage that from then on gains were measured in hundreds of metres. Trench warfare lasted there from the autumn of 1914 to the spring of 1918.

The trench system

A typical trench system had several parallel lines, front, support and reserve, a few hundred metres apart and linked by communication trenches. Trenches were dug in zigzags or broken up by traverses so that a shell burst or fire along the trench would not strike the whole garrison. On the enemy side a trench had a parapet with a fire step, and its walls were revetted with sandbags, wire mesh or planks. Wooden duckboards were laid on the floor over drainage channels. In Flanders, where groundwater flooded the trenches, the Allies built above-ground breastworks of sandbags.

Narrow trenches called saps were pushed out from the front line towards the enemy. The men sheltered in dugouts. On the German side these were often concrete, several storeys deep, ventilated, and at least 4 metres below ground. Belts of barbed wire, in places more than 15 metres deep, ran in front of the first line. Wiring parties put them up at night, and wire combined with machine-gun fire stopped most of the attacks that failed.

Between the opposing trenches lay no man’s land, a strip of ground held by neither side. Cratered by shells and crossed by wire, it was swept by fire from both sides. On the Western Front it was usually between 90 and 275 metres wide, but on Vimy Ridge only 25 metres. At night patrols, wiring parties and raiders went out into it, and the wounded from failed attacks often lay there for hours because no one could reach them.

Over time defence moved into depth. From the winter of 1916–17 the Germans held a zone of strongpoints in which the front line was only lightly manned and the main strength was kept further back for counter-attacks. In March 1917 they abandoned their trenches along the front from near Arras to Soissons and withdrew to a new position, the Hindenburg Line.

Daily life at the front

Soldiers did not sit in the trenches for years on end. Armies rotated units through the front line constantly, because wet, cold men exposed to fire quickly lost heart. Canadians usually spent four to six days in the front line and then as many in the support line and in reserve. According to the British historian Dan Snow, between battles a British unit spent perhaps 10 days a month in the trench system, and of those rarely more than three in the front line itself. There were exceptions: the Australian 31st Battalion once spent 53 days in the line at Villers-Bretonneux. At Verdun General Philippe Pétain introduced a rotation of divisions known as the noria: units were relieved after a short spell of fighting, before they had bled to death.

The day in the trenches began at dawn with the alarm known in English as stand-to. Dawn was the usual time for an attack, so the whole garrison stood to arms in the front line. If no attack came, there followed inspection, breakfast and, for the Canadians, the daily rum ration. By day, when raising one’s head above the parapet invited a sniper’s bullet, the men cleaned latrines, filled sandbags and repaired duckboards, and in their spare moments read, wrote letters and diaries or gambled. Most happened at night: under cover of darkness troops and supplies were moved, wire was repaired and new trenches were dug.

The food was bland and monotonous. Bread came in loaves shared among several soldiers. Yet, as the Canadian War Museum notes, no one starved. It was different on the German side at the end of the war: during the spring offensive of 1918 hungry soldiers in many places stopped to loot British supply depots.

Conditions were the worst of it. Life in the trenches meant mud, water, rats, lice, disease and constant shelling. Rats, fattened on the food and waste of armies that stayed put, spread disease and also fed on the bodies of the dead. Lice carried trench fever, which infected more than a million Allied soldiers. Only in 1918 did doctors establish that lice were the cause. Cold and damp brought trench foot, a frostbite-like infection that in extreme cases ended in gangrene and amputation. In the British Army it was already a serious problem in the winter of 1914/1915, and it was brought under control only by regular foot inspections, changes of socks and waterproof boots.

In autumn and winter the trenches turned into swamps. On the Somme, during the fighting for the Transloy Ridges, the chalky soil turned into a sticky mud that caked men up to the knees and clogged their weapons, and Scottish soldiers abandoned their sodden kilts along the way because they no longer had the strength to carry them. It was worst in the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. After the downpours the ground, churned up by weeks of shelling and with its drainage ditches destroyed, turned to mud and the stream valleys to swamp. In the last attack on Passchendaele the Canadian battalions waited to attack in shell holes full of mud. According to John Buchan, at Verdun in December 1916 French Zouaves with frostbitten feet went into the last attack on their knees or leaning on their rifles like crutches.

Death and wounds

Even on quiet days the front killed. Shellfire and snipers’ bullets constantly took men from the trenches. These steady losses were called wastage. In an 800-strong infantry battalion they reached 10 percent a month, or 80 men killed or put out of action. By some estimates artillery caused around 75 percent of casualties. From 1915 armies introduced steel helmets, first the French Adrian helmet, then the British Brodie helmet, to reduce fatal head wounds. Trench periscopes and steel loophole plates gave protection from snipers.

Trench warfare also meant raids: night attacks by small parties on the enemy’s trenches to seize prisoners and documents and find out which unit was opposite. They were pioneered in February 1915 by the Canadian regiment Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and from 1916 they became carefully planned operations involving artillery. The bloodiest moments, however, were the great offensives. On 1 July 1916 British infantry left their trenches on the Somme after a seven-day bombardment that had not reached the deep German dugouts. That day the British Army lost 57,470 men, including 19,240 killed and died of wounds. Over the whole war, depending on the count, between 9 and 10 million soldiers died, and by some counts up to 11 million.

From 1915 soldiers also faced gas. The Germans made the first major chlorine attack at Ypres on 22 April 1915, and later both sides turned to phosgene and mustard gas. Gas masks soon limited the weapon’s effect, but gas killed some 90,000 soldiers and poisoned, blinded or maimed more than a million. Sappers also dug tunnels under the enemy’s trenches: at Messines on 7 June 1917, 19 great mines exploded beneath the German lines.

After the great attacks the wounded often waited a long time for help. At Passchendaele in October 1917 the New Zealanders found the slopes strewn with wounded men who had lain there without help for several days. Medical officers in the front line treated whom they could and sent the wounded on to field ambulances, and from there to dressing stations and casualty clearing stations. When hundreds of wounded poured in, doctors had to practise triage: they decided who would be operated on at once, who could wait a few hours, and who was beyond help. For longer treatment the wounded went to hospitals in France and England.

The war sped up the progress of medicine. In France Marie Skłodowska-Curie organised a fleet of about 20 X-ray cars and about 200 permanent radiology rooms. An X-ray made it possible to find a bullet or shell fragment in a wounded man’s body before the surgeon began to operate. The Scottish doctor Elsie Inglis founded women’s hospitals that treated the wounded in France, Serbia and Russia. In 1918 the Spanish flu swept through the armies: according to Eckard Michels, during the Second Battle of the Marne it put nearly 400,000 German soldiers out of action, and its second wave killed above all the young and healthy.

The war also wounded the mind. As early as 1914 British soldiers complained of ringing in the ears, memory loss, headaches, dizziness, tremors and sensitivity to noise. The term “shell shock” first appeared in print in 1915, in an article by Charles Myers in The Lancet. Doctors then believed the symptoms were caused by the concussion of exploding shells, and the military often saw cowardice in them. Some sufferers were tried, and even executed, for desertion and cowardice. Treatment ranged from talk to electric shocks. In the Canadian army alone almost 10,000 soldiers were diagnosed with shell shock.

The Christmas truce and moments of respite

Despite the hostility, on quieter sectors of the front unwritten arrangements of the “we won’t shoot if you don’t” kind sometimes held. From November 1914 there were informal pauses in the firing, for example when both sides brought food up to the trenches after dark. Commanders tried to stamp them out: on 5 December General Horace Smith-Dorrien forbade friendly contact with the enemy. The governments rejected Pope Benedict XV’s appeal for a Christmas ceasefire.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1914, on many sectors of the Western Front, soldiers stopped fighting of their own accord. This Christmas truce was not one event but a series of local, unagreed ceasefires. Germans and British sang carols, met in no man’s land, swapped cigarettes and food, and above all buried their dead. The football matches for which the truce is best known are the least documented part of the story. In the following years commanders prevented anything similar, and at Christmas 1915 there were only a few brief ceasefires.

Real respite came behind the lines. There soldiers had more free time, although they had to train and provide work parties for the front. They spent hours in YMCA huts, went to concerts and lectures, played sport, and from time to time got leave. The Canadian War Museum judges that rotation and leave saved many soldiers from breaking down.

Other fronts

On the Eastern Front, with its vast distances and thinner lines, movement returned more often. The factories producing shells, concrete and barbed wire were far away, so elaborate trench systems like those in the west were built less often. But there too the front froze in trenches for long periods: in the winter of 1914/1915 on the Rawka and the Bzura, where at Bolimów the Germans first used gas on a large scale, and in 1915–1917 in Volhynia and eastern Galicia. The Austro-Hungarian positions broken in 1916 by the offensive of General Aleksei Brusilov had three belts of fortifications, deep dugouts and several rows of wire. In winter the worst enemy was often the cold: in the Carpathian offensive of 1915 soldiers slept in the snow without tents or fires, and the wounded who could not be carried down quickly died of cold.

On the Italian front the fighting was in the mountains. On the Isonzo, on the Karst plateau, trenches could not be dug in the bare rock, so the defenders sheltered behind walls of piled stones. Shells shattered them, and splinters of rock greatly increased the casualties. In the Alps trenches reached heights of 3,900 metres, on steep rock and glaciers.

At Gallipoli, after the landings in April 1915, the Allies were stuck on narrow beachheads. At Anzac the opposing trenches were in places only 15 metres apart, and the soldiers constantly threw grenades at each other. In summer they suffered from heat and dysentery, and at the end of November from storm, downpour, blizzard and frost: at Suvla alone more than 5,000 cases of frostbite were recorded, and more than 200 men drowned in flooded trenches or froze to death. In January 1916 the last soldiers left the peninsula.

Voices from the trenches

Trench warfare created its own literature. On 3 May 1915 near Ypres the Canadian doctor John McCrae, the day after burying a friend, wrote the poem “In Flanders Fields” about the dead who lie beneath the crosses among the poppies. It was not a lament against the war but a call to fight on. After the war the poem gave rise to the custom of wearing a red poppy on Remembrance Day.

The Frenchman Henri Barbusse, who fought in the front line as a 41-year-old volunteer, described the life of one squad in the novel “Under Fire”. He showed war as filth, mud, exhaustion and death, not as heroic deed. In December 1916 the book won the Prix Goncourt. Soldiers took it as a true picture of what they had lived through, although after the war some veterans accused it of literary exaggeration.

In Britain the loudest voice was Siegfried Sassoon’s protest. The poet and officer, decorated with the Military Cross for bringing in wounded men under fire after a raid on the German trenches, refused in July 1917 to return to duty because he believed the war was being deliberately prolonged. The authorities wanted no trial: a medical board found that Sassoon was suffering a nervous breakdown, and he was sent to Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh, which treated officers with shell shock.

There Sassoon met a younger poet, Wilfred Owen, who was being treated for shell shock after a trench-mortar shell burst near him, and encouraged him to write about what he had been through at the front. In the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” Owen called the Latin maxim about the sweetness of dying for one’s country “the old Lie”, and in a draft preface he wrote: “My subject is War, and the pity of War.” In the summer of 1918 he went back to the front and was killed on 4 November crossing the canal at Ors, a week before the Armistice. His poems were published in 1920 by Sassoon.

How historians judge the trench war

The image of the trenches as futile slaughter was fixed after the war by literature: the trench poets, such as Owen and Sassoon, and Erich Maria Remarque’s novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”. In 1961 the British writer Alan Clark, in his book “The Donkeys”, portrayed British generals as incompetent and popularised the phrase “lions led by donkeys”. He attributed it to a conversation between the generals Erich Ludendorff and Max Hoffmann, but according to his biographer he invented it himself. The image was kept alive by the musical “Oh, What a Lovely War!” of 1963 and the comedy series “Blackadder Goes Forth” of 1989.

Historians such as John Terraine, and later Brian Bond, who wrote of the “myth” of a futile war, challenged this image. The historian John Bourne pointed out that in 1918 the British Army was the most mechanised army in the world and under Douglas Haig had adopted a modern way of fighting. According to Dan Snow, more than 200 generals were killed, wounded or captured during the war, and by the summer of 1918 the British Army was probably at its best ever. This view is known as the “learning curve”. Not everyone accepts it: John Keegan refused to accept that the British Army went through such a curve, and Tim Travers blamed the pre-war officer corps, attached to privilege and reputation, for the army’s slowness to adapt. Haig is still sometimes called “the Butcher” because of the two million British casualties under his command.

Yet according to Bourne there is little disagreement among scholars about the transformation of the army itself, while there is no consensus on its speed. The deadlock in the west was broken only in 1918, by new methods: short, carefully planned bombardments, storm-troop tactics, tanks and close co-operation between all arms. On 8 August at Amiens tanks helped the Canadians and Australians break through the front, and three months later the war was over.