You know how this works
"Not all the war memorials and Armistice Day Festivals can pay a tithe to the tribute due to those whose lot it was to be offered up as cannon fodder in this most bloody of all campaigns the world has seen." - PVT Bert Horton, RAMC stretcher-bearer
Trench warfare is a hallmark of the First World War. Images of dirty ditches winding through the wilderness are the first things that come to mind when thinking of how the war was fought.
Trenches scarred both the men who fought in them and the places where they were built. So many historic battlefields are, to this day, woven together with long, root-like systems connecting one old battle position to another.
The ordinary observer of history often derides the trench as an unnecessary and ugly splotch on the tactics of the time. How could the Generals be so careless and cruel? Didn't they know how horrid life in the trenches was for their soldiers?
While the trenches were certainly ugly, it's an uncomfortable truth that they likely saved more lives than they cost.
As Hew Strachan put it in his 2014 book The First World War:
"Trenches created health problems but they saved lives. To speak of the horror of the trenches is to substitute hyperbole for common sense: the war would have been far more horrific if there had been no trenches. They protected flesh and blood from the worst effects of the firepower revolution of the late nineteenth century."1
World War One was the first major conflict in history where deaths due to fighting, I.E. bullets, shells, etc, outnumbered deaths due to disease. The ratio on the Western Front was 5:1.2 Combat came and went in waves. At the peaks of the fighting, hundreds of thousands of men died each month. In September 1914, French losses on the Western Front alone totaled 238,000. That's 238,000 deaths, not casualties.3
With numbers so staggering, is it possible to imagine it could have been worse? As hard as it is to swallow, without the cover of intricate trench systems, those numbers would have certainly been higher.
Anatomy of a Trench
WWI came to a grinding stalemate early on. By the end of 1914, after sacrificing thousands of men to hopeless offensives against the newly invented machine gun, the armies of both sides had entrenched themselves and begun preparing for a long, bitter fight.
The troops began building their new home. At the order of their upper-class officers, the mostly middle-to-low-class enlisted fighting force moved thousands of tons of earth to carve out the trenches. With shovels and sacks, men dug for days and stacked sandbags for weeks. Wooden planks reinforced sandbags and supported the walls and ceilings of dugouts used for sleeping quarters, radio control rooms, and general shelter from the weather.
It's estimated the combined mileage of the allied and central power trenches—if you stretched them out and laid them end to end—totaled 35,000 miles and they stretched from the Belgium shoreline to Southern France.
Historian Paul Fussell describes the trenches as three strategically placed lines, each with a specific function. The front trench typically sat 50 yards to a mile from the enemy's front trench and was guarded by an incoherent jumble of barbed wire. In the front trench were the firing teams with machine guns, grenades, and watchmen trained on the enemy. A few hundred yards behind the front trench was the support trench and even further behind that was the reserve trench, where men rested for their turn up front.
Most trenches were a conglomeration of long ditches, some deep and some shallow, with sporadically placed dugouts. The condition of the dugouts differentiated a good trench from a bad trench. A soldier's quality of life was in large part governed by how nice the dugouts were. If you could stay out of the rain, had a warm, somewhat soft bed, and could escape the cold, trench life could be somewhat bearable.
The Germans on the Western Front had good trenches according to some of the Allied troops. They built huge, deep, furnished dugouts big enough for dozens of people. They had comfortable beds with stuffing, tables with chairs, and pumps used to prevent flooding. Ted Rimmer who fought in the South Lancashire Regiment recounts the German dugouts his unit seized after a successful assault:
We were in the advance to the Hindenburg Line, talking about dugouts, and we got to the Hindenburg Line and you ought to have seen dugouts they had. They were like hotel rooms, they were all fitted out with special pumps and everything – tables and everything there, you know, not like ours! Ours were just simply dugout earth and sort of, what you slept on was a wire netting mattress, just wire netting in our dugouts, they were deep big dugouts. But they were marvelous their dugouts, they had tables and all that and laid out with stuff on them!4
Using the dugout grading scale, Allied trenches were bad. Victor Polhill described how haphazard their dugouts were in comparison to the Germans:
To make these things, you cut a piece out of the trench about 3 foot wide and about 4 or 5 feet deep into the side of the trench. Put a piece of boarding or something on top and perhaps a piece of something that might keep the wet out, and then piled the earth on top of that and in front you left a piece of blanket or something, so that the front could be excluded from the wind. And also the, if you had a candle in there at night time, the enemy wouldn’t notice it, the light in there. So at night time, the first thing you did when you got in this little bivvy place was to light your candle and you suddenly felt much warmer than you did outside; it made an enormous difference, the light.5
Sleepless Routine
Sleep was a rarity in most Western Front trench battle positions. The operational tempo of the time was arduous, to say the least, and the constant threat of raids and random shellings meant if troops did manage to sleep, it was light.
Officers enforced grueling schedules on their men which robbed opportunities to sleep. Men "stood to" every morning at dawn in anticipation of an enemy raid and every night at dusk for the same. A typical day in the trenches consisted of a 5 a.m. stand-to until 6 a.m., 7 a.m. breakfast, and a myriad of duties the rest of the day and into the night. Nighttime was the busiest time in the trenches. The cover of dark allowed troops to move about freely and accomplish necessary tasks such as supply runs, rifle inspections, digging latrines, pumping out floodwater, and fortification repairs.
In his memoir, Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger describes the trench experience as a sleep-deprived nightmare:
Trench life here was as exhausting as it well could be. The day began before dawn, when every man had to be standing-to. From 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. only two men from each section might be sleeping, which worked out at two hours sleep per man, and even this, owing to being wakened earlier or having straw to fetch and one thing or another to attend to, was often illusory.6
Junger started his career as an enlisted soldier in the German army on the Western Front but he'd achieve the rank of Lieutenant and lead a platoon by the end of the war. His first experience in the trenches came at Orainville, a small commune just north of Paris.
It was there Junger got his first taste of combat, and it wasn't quite what he expected. Junger and his German comrades dreamt of glory and honor when they set off for the Western Front. They got excited at the prospect of experiencing the dangers of combat and wanted nothing else but to live an unordinary life:
We had grown up in a material age, and in each one of us there was a yearning for a great experience, such as we had never known. The war had entered into us like wine. We had set out in a rain of flowers to seek the death of heroes. The war was our dream of greatness, power, and glory. It was a man's work, a duel on fields whose flowers would be stained with blood. There is no lovelier death in the world... anything rather than stay at home, anything to make one with the rest...7
Junger and his friends quickly came to a hard realization that war is anything but exciting and glorious. Their dreams of adventure were dashed to pieces as soon as they stepped foot in the trenches. The reality of trench warfare is it's governed by boring, monotonous routine. Good WWI armies were the ones who could stay disciplined through the boredom. Who can keep their machine guns the cleanest? Who had the most patience? In a duel between ditches, the winner is whoever can focus the longest.
After a short while with the regiment we had pretty well lost the illusion with which we had set out. Instead of the dangers we had hoped for, only mud and work and sleepless nights had fallen to our lot, and the conquest of these called for a heroism that was little to our taste.8
Other accounts detail a similar experience. Men on all fronts of WWI realized life in the trenches would amount to futile, repetitive hard labor. As soon as fortifications were built, shells would tear them apart, and troops would go about the hard task of repairing the barbed wire, refilling sandbags, and replacing wooden supports while somehow maintaining cover. This cycle repeated itself until the end of the war. Private Harold Boughton who fought in Gallipoli described how his trenches needed constant maintenance:
The trenches were most, oh horrible things to be in and, as I say, very often you had nothing at the back at all. And of course, when they started shelling these things that we’d built up in the front, they were soon knocked to pieces and all hands in building them up again to get some protection. There were no dugouts, great big dugouts, as there were in France, you just had holes in the side of the trench if you were lucky, or just built up some of this rock and then put some corrugated iron if you could scrounge any over the top of it to get any shelter. And as for sleeping, well you just lay in the bottom of the trench or on a little firestep that you might have been able to make, that was the only place where you got any rest.9
Junger was heavily influenced by his experience as an enlisted man in the "chalk trenches" of France. He felt the grueling schedule, and dangerous patrols into no man's land were an unnecessary burden on the men. He would take those lessons learned and apply them to how he led his men later on in the war:
That month, the hardest of the whole war for me, was a good schooling all the same. It made me thoroughly familiar with the whole round of trench duties and fatigues in their severest form. This experience stood me in good stead later, when without it I might as an officer have demanded the impossible of my men.10
Deeper Look
Life in the trenches cannot be summed up in a word. There are so many first-hand accounts that describe a variety of experiences ranging from sheer boredom in the reserves to others who were unfortunate enough to be stuck in the front trenches during the rainy season.
However, if you could sum it up in a word, it'd be “uncomfortable”. A deployment to the trenches was a several month-long irritating camping trip, except there were no amenities, and the peaceful sounds of nature normally enjoyed while camping were drowned out by explosions and the cries of the wounded. It was anything but relaxing.
Trench warfare left a lasting mark on those who managed to survive the rivers of gunfire and the monsoons of shell bombardments. They returned home with nightmares they would never wake from.
Over the next few posts in this series, we'll learn more about those nightmares. If what you just read in these few thousand words blew your mind, just hang on for the rest. It only gets worse.
Strachan, Hew. 2014. The First World War. Simon & Schuster. https://www.perlego.com/book/782013/the-first-world-war-pdf.
Strachan, Hew. 2014. The First World War. Simon & Schuster. https://www.perlego.com/book/782013/the-first-world-war-pdf.
Strachan, Hew. 2014. The First World War. Simon & Schuster. https://www.perlego.com/book/782013/the-first-world-war-pdf.
“Voices of the First World War: Trench Life.” 2018. Imperial War Museums. 2018. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-trench-life.
“Voices of the First World War: Trench Life.” 2018. Imperial War Museums. 2018. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-trench-life.
Junger, Ernst. “Orainville.” Story. In The Storm of Steel: Original 1929 Translation, translated by Basil Creighton, 3–3. London: Chatto and Windus, 1929.
Junger, Ernst. “Orainville.” Story. In The Storm of Steel: Original 1929 Translation, translated by Basil Creighton, 3–3. London: Chatto and Windus, 1929.
Junger, Ernst. “Orainville.” Story. In The Storm of Steel: Original 1929 Translation, translated by Basil Creighton, 3–3. London: Chatto and Windus, 1929.
“Voices of the First World War: Trench Life.” 2018. Imperial War Museums. 2018. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-trench-life.
Junger, Ernst. “Orainville.” Story. In The Storm of Steel: Original 1929 Translation, translated by Basil Creighton, 3–3. London: Chatto and Windus, 1929.