WW12+Life+in+the+Trenches

=The nature of trench warfare and life in the trenches dealing with experiences of Allied and German soldiers=


 * Focus Questions:**
 * **What were living conditions like for soldiers in the trenches?**
 * **What diseases were common among soldiers?**
 * **How long did a soldier remain in the trenches?**

=**Overview**=


 * There is no one description of the conditions endured by soldiers in the trenches which accurately reflects life for all soldiers at all times. The descriptions of muddy quagmires only apply to those times when it was raining, which was quite often. In contrast, at times it was hot and dusty. The freezing conditions only apply to winter. It is easy to make generalisations about conditions. What you read in a soldier’s letter about life in the trenches, or what you see in a photograph, was that person’s experience or the conditions at the time and place the photograph was taken. Conditions were terrible, but they varied from time to time and place to place.


 * The standard practice was for soldiers to spend four days in the reserve lines, then four days in the front line, then four days in the support lines and another four days in the front line. After this they would have two weeks behind the lines in a billet before the whole process was repeated.


 * There was little knowledge or understanding of the conditions of the trenches and the suffering of the soldiers by those in command whose headquarters were miles behind the lines.


 * Study Source A and list the difficulties which soldiers faced in the trenches. **

** Source A **

The British Generals on the Western Front had a policy of attack; trench warfare was only considered to be temporary and they saw no point in supplying materials to make the front line habitable as it was anticipated that the trenches would be used only as a starting position for the next attack. Indeed, it was seriously thought that the soldiers’ aggressive spirit would be eroded if the trenches were too comfortable! As a result the soldiers had to live, fight, eat, sleep, wash and defecate in a narrow trench which was open to the elements, and often flooded for weeks at a time. The men's attempts to dig sleeping holes or "pozzies" in the rear of the trench was soon to be forbidden following a number of cave-ins in the wet weather when the occupants of the holes were buried. The men were subsequently expected to sleep wherever they could; in wet weather they lived under groundsheets or tents in the bottom of the trench on duckboards. The forward wall of the trench, known by the soldiers as the "horizon" was constantly under enemy observation and any part of the body which was poked over the top was promptly shot by snipers. The front line was regularly bombarded by mortars or high explosive shells, and often bombed or machine gunned by enemy aircraft.

This was bad enough in summer, but it is almost impossible to imagine what it was like to live in a waterlogged or snow and ice filled trench in midwinter for weeks at a time; even fires were forbidden because the smoke would attract enemy attention and the men could only huddle together for warmth, thus increasing the risk of louse infestation.

Latrines were ideally dug behind the front line trenches but obviously these could not be used during enemy attacks and a small pit was usually dug in the front line trench to accommodate the men; as the war progressed, if the trench was demolished by shell fire, dead bodies were incorporated in the repaired trench wall and the stench of putrefaction was added to that of urine and faeces. It needs no imagination to understand what the trench conditions were like after the trench had been recently shelled!

These crowded, squalid conditions in which the men had to live and fight were a fertile breeding ground for rats who lived on the bodies, they were described as being as big as cats. There were flies in the warm weather and of course lice.

Louse infestation ran at about 97% and explains why Trench Fever was so common.

Dr M.G. Miller, //Lice and Men: Trench Fever and Trench Life in the AIF//, (This paper was first presented at a clinical meeting of the Second Anzac Medical Society held in France in October 1993)

=**Living Conditions**=

**Mud**

Northern Europe has a damp climate, especially in winter. At times, constant rain, combined with the effects of heavy artillery bombardment, turned the trenches and battlefield into muddy bogs. This was particularly evident during the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) in 1917.

Mud is the chief enemy and chief misery of the soldier. Mud soft and deep, that you sink into, vainly seeking a foothold on something solid: or stiff and clinging, gripping boots so firmly as sometimes to drag them off. Mud, that coats men, horses, guns, rifles, and all in a thick camouflage, so that they become almost indistinguishable from the ground. It clings to men’s bodies and cracks their skins, and the slimy horror of it soaks their souls and sucks their courage. I have known those who can face an enemy barrage without flinching, who still shiver at the memory of their experiences in the mud of Flanders. Boyd, Sergeant P., //Salvage//, 1918 (in Ken Webb p.41)
 * Source B **

It’s the end of the 1916 winter and the conditions are almost unbelievable. We live in a world of Somme mud. We sleep in it, work in it, fight in it, wade in it and many of us die in it. We see it, feel it, eat it and curse it, but we can’t escape it, not even by dying. E.P.F. Lynch, //Somme Mud//, p.108
 * Source C **


 * Cold**

In winter, the temperature dropped to below freezing. Soldiers lived in trenches for weeks at a time in the freezing conditions. Result: frostbite causing gangrene and other infections.

Though these winters gave the men the most prolonged experience of cold, each night tested the men. Wrote Drinkwater: ‘Anyone who has not stood all night in a muddy trench with sodden clothing cannot know the sheer ecstasy of the first gleam of sunshine. To feel its warmth penetrating one’s chilled bones is something beyond my power to describe.’ Winter, D., //Death’s Men//, Penguin, 1978, p.96 (in Webb p.47)
 * Source D **

An hour’s cold, cramped sleep during which I am oblivious to everything about the war except that I’m cold, freezing cold. There’s two things I’ll never be able to forget – cold and chats. E.P.F. Lynch, //Somme Mud//, p.105
 * Source E **


 * Noise**

Heavier comes the barrage, by the greatest of good fortune falling just short of our line. The shells are missing us by a matter of yards. Noise is everywhere. We lie on the shuddering ground, rocking to the vibrations, under a shower of solid noise we feel we could reach out and touch. The shells come, burst and are gone, but that invisible noise keeps on – now near, now far, now near, now far again. Flat, unceasing noise. E.P.F. Lynch, //Somme Mud//, p.144
 * Source F **


 * Lice**

Caused constant irritation and itching. Scratching could break the surface of the skin and lead to infection, e.g. boils, impetigo, ulcers.

Our billet had been christened ‘The Bug Pit’ by previous occupants, and there was a notice to that effect on the door. One day I took off my tunic, I noticed with a sense of horror that the inevitable had happened – ‘I was lousy’. I felt like hiding my head in shame, but on looking around furtively, I noticed that all the others were going down the seams of their tunics with lighted cigarettes. After that I felt a bit better and did the same to my own seams... From the amount of blood the vermin sucked from my body throughout the war, I wondered that I did not become anaemic. A. Stuart Dolden, //Cannon Fodder//, Blandford Press, 1980, p.16 (in McCallum p.64)
 * Source G **

Jack, like most of the men, scratched almost all the time, and gradually less aware that he did so. Not all of them were resigned. Tyson had once been driven so frantic that the medical officer ordered him to have fifteen days rest. The constant irritation had proved more wearing to him even than the sound of heavy guns or the fear of dying... By the time they had reached their billets jack felt the first irritation on his skin. Within three hours the heat on his body as he marched had hatched the eggs of hundreds of lice that had lain dormant in the seams of the shirt. By the time he reached the front his skin was alive with them. Faulks, S. //Birdsong//, 1994 pp.346, 347 (quoted in Webb p.45)
 * Source H **


 * Rats**

Huge rats were everywhere in the trenches. They ate soldiers’ rations, dead soldiers, and even nibbled on living soldiers.

The outstanding feature of the Armentieres sector was the extraordinary number of rats. The area was infested with them... It was impossible to keep them out of the dugouts even. They grew fat on the food that they pilfered from us, and anything they could pick up in or around the trenches; they were bloated and loathsome to look at... One night a rat ran across my face. Unfortunately my mouth happened to be open and the hind legs of the filthy little beast went right in. Dolden, AS, //Cannon Fodder//, Blandford Press, 1980 (Ken Webb p.46)
 * Source I **

Rats came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welch, a new officer joined the company and, in token of welcome, was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned in that night he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand. Robert Graves, //Goodbye to All That//, 1929
 * Source J **

=Diseases=

The trenches were very unhygienic. Soldiers lived in the same clothes for days on end. They were lice-infested. Huge rats were everywhere in the trenches. At times the trenches became putrid. At worst, a combination of vomit, blood, urine, excrement, mud, rotting corpses and vermin caused serious illness among the troops, e.g. dysentery. Because of the conditions, small wounds could quickly become seriously infected.


 * Source K **
 * **Hospital admissions for the BEF on the Western Front, 1917** ||
 * trench fever || not classified as disease ||
 * dysentery || 6,025 ||
 * enteric fever or typhus || 1,275 ||
 * frostbite || 21,487 ||
 * nephritis (kidney infection) || 15,214 ||
 * pneumonia || 2,157 ||
 * tuberculosis || 1,660 ||
 * venereal disease || 48,508 ||
 * trench foot || 70,000+ ||
 * (Denis Winter, //Death’s Men//, quoted in Anne McCallum, //Evidence of War//, p.60) ||


 * Trench foot** was caused by constant exposure to cold, wet conditions. Where there was constant damp and poor drainage, a soldier’s feet could begin to rot leading to gangrene and other infection and often resulting in amputation.

Your feet swell to two or three times their normal size and go completely dead. You could stick a bayonet into them and not feel a thing. If you are fortunate enough not to lose your feet and the swelling begins to go down, it is then that the intolerable, indescribable agony begins. I have heard men cry and even scream with the pain and many had to have their feet and legs amputated. I was one of the lucky ones, but one more day in that trench and it may have been too late. (Sergeant Harry Roberts, RAMC, after holding a flooded ‘strategic’ front line trench for six days and nights, just before the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, 1916) Quoted in Brown, //Tommy Goes to War//, p.88 (in McCallum p.65)
 * Source L **

Many men are being evacuated with trench feet or frostbite. The feet swell and sometimes the boot has to be cut off. Huge water blisters appear and when these burst, a painful raw sore is left. Some feet just go numb and appear to die. Others turn black. The men suffering from trench feet endure great agony, can’t stand and must be sent out of the line to have their feet amputated. E.P.F. Lynch, Somme Mud, p.33
 * Source M **

Case of trench feet suffered by unidentified soldier, France, 1917 Source: Library and Archives Canada


 * Gas Gangrene**

Caused by bacteria in the soil which came from the manure in the farm fields through which the trenches ran. The particular germ entered the body through a wound. It caused a particularly serious form of gangrene with large gassy pustules. The disease ate away at the flesh and often led to amputation.
 * Source N **

If you really must look at some pictures (not from World War One), try Wikipedia.


 * Battle fatigue / Shell shock**

Some soldiers suffered severe psychological problems. Today they would be diagnosed with Combat Stress Reaction or, in longer-lasting and more serious cases, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. During World War I these conditions were not acknowledged by military authorities and sufferers were considered cowards, malingerers, shirkers. The psychological impact of the war had devastating effects on soldiers during the war and, for many, for the rest of their lives. //Photograph taken by Official War Photographer at an Australian Advanced Dressing Station near Ypres in 1917. The wounded soldier in the lower left of the photograph has the "thousand yard stare" indicative of shell-shock.//

Symptoms could include: anger, violence, introspection, morbid thoughts, nightmares, shaking, indecision, disorientation.

The ‘shell-shocks’ sat about, dumb, or making queer foolish noises, or staring with a look of animal fear in their eyes. From a padded room came a sound of singing. Some idiot of war was singing between bursts of laughter. It all seemed so funny to him, that war, so mad!... The nervous cases were the worst and in greatest number. Many were raving mad. The shell-shock victims clawed at their mouths unceasingly, or lay motionless like corpses with staring eyes, or trembled in every limb, moaning miserably and afflicted with great terror. Gibbs, P., //Now It Can Be Told//, London, 1920 (in Ken Webb p.49)
 * Source O **

The reader will, therefore, understand that whenever the term shell-shock appears in these pages, it is to be understood as a popular but inadequate title for all those mental effects of war experience which are sufficient to incapacitate a man from the performance of his military duties. The term is vague; perhaps its use implies too much; but this is not altogether a disadvantage, for never in the history of mankind have the stresses and strains laid upon body and mind been so great or so numerous as in the present war. We may therefore expect to find many cases which present not a single disease, not even a mixture, but a chemical compound of diseases, so to speak. In civil life, we often meet with cases of nervous breakdown uncomplicated by any gross physical injury. We are scarcely likely, for example, to meet it complicated by gas poisoning and a bullet wound. Yet such combinations as these - or worse - are to be met with in the hospitals every day. Grafton Elliot Smith and Tom Hatherly Pear, //SHELL SHOCK AND ITS LESSONS//, Manchester University press, 1917
 * Source P **

=Food=

Food was a constant source of complaint for soldiers in the trenches:
 * hot food was not always available especially during a battle
 * hot food was usually bully beef (tinned corned beef) or Maconochie stew (a tinned vegetable stew)
 * the rations of bread and biscuits were often stale
 * fresh water was often difficult to get
 * tea and jam rations were also given
 * soldiers at the front received a daily rum ration (in a jar stamped S.R.D. ‘Supply Reserve Depot’ which the soldiers soon dubbed ‘Seldom Reaches Destination’ or ‘Soon Runs Dry’

The men are having their tea of bully beef and biscuits, stale bread and jam out of the inevitable cigarette tin. Here and there we spot a lump of cheese. Hard dry tucker, washed down with water. We come to one crowd eating some buttery-looking stuff out of little blue cardboard boxes, which they found in a Fritz dugout and say it’s butter though it might be boot grease for all they know. E.P.F. Lynch, //Somme Mud//, p.87
 * Source Q **

German soldiers, especially later in the war, suffered more than the Allied soldiers from inadequate rations. Liddell Hart partly attributes the loss of German morale at the front during 1918 to the realisation during their Spring Offensive that the British were far better fed than they were.

Anyone with personal experience of war knows how the thought of food and of civilised comfort fills the soldier’s horizon. How far was the German army’s sudden morale decline from July onward, when the last attack proved abortive, due not only to increasing hunger but to the eye-opening conviction of the enemy’s greater material power of endurance? Propaganda and censorship could hide the difference so long as the front was an inviolable wall of partition. But when the Germans broke through the British lines and into the back areas the truth was revealed to the German troops. B.H. Liddell Hart, //History of the First World War//, 1934, pp.397-8
 * Source R **


 * Source Based Questions: **


 * 1. Choose any two of these sources. Using the chosen sources and your own knowledge, describe life in the trenches for soldiers on the Western Front. **


 * 2. Choose another two sources from this page. Assess how useful these sources would be for an historian studying life in the trenches. **
 * In your answer consider the perspective provided by the two sources and the reliability of each source. **