A dismal existence

6 min read

From fear to boredom, life in the trenches left men battling a range of emotions – as well as lice and rodents

YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO LIFE IN THE TRENCHES

German soldiers carry a machine gun through a trench near Reims. The advent of powerful new weaponry meant that sheltering below ground level was a basic necessity for survival

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N “earer and nearer creeps this terrible inferno which only ends in death. May it come quick and mercifully.” So wrote Sergeant Horace Reginald Stanley in his diary while serving at Ypres in 1915. “Some poor wretch has the side of his skull blown away and it is obvious nothing can be done for him. Oh the horror of it all.”

Sergeant Stanley’s testimony remains a shocking, uncomfortable read – even from the distance of 108 years. Yet there was nothing particularly extraordinary about it. For countless soldiers – eating, sleeping, fighting and often dying at the edge of no-man’s land – such horrors would have been all-too familiar. Trench warfare is surely the defining characteristic of World War I. As anyone who’s watched Blackadder or All Quiet on the Western Front will attest, when we think of the 1914–18 conflict, our minds invariably turn to what soldiers were forced to endure in the trenches.

SELF-PRESERVATION

There was nothing new about trench warfare when World War I erupted in 1914. Recent conflicts – the American Civil War and Russo-Japanese War among them – all pointed to trenches becoming the default for armed struggles between large, industrial powers unable to land rapid knock-out blows. With new technologies such as powerful artillery and rapid-fire machine guns enabling defenders to cut down attackers with terrifying efficiency, military planners in 1914 were painfully aware that their armies would probably have to head underground in the interests of self-preservation.

Yet what made World War I different from what had gone before was the sheer scale of the trench system that emerged from the early months of the conflict. By the end of the war, a system of subterranean passages snaked its way from the North Sea coast of Belgium all the way south to Alsace on the Swiss border. And it wasn’t confined to the Western Front. From the southern shores of the Baltic to the mountains of northern Italy, from Gallipoli to the Middle East, soldiers got out their spades and dug for shelter. All in all, the trenches built during World War I, laid end to end, would have stretched for 35,000 miles.

In some sectors, front line trenches could be as far as a mile from enemy positions; in others, no-man’s land was little longer t

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