The observer who goes up in an aeroplane and looks down on the vast battlefield of Northern France and Flanders sees the country below him marked by minute threadlike cracks, running here and there, into and out of one another; an endless and seemingly confused web. These are the trenches. Tangled though they appear to the unpractised eye, to the expert observer their confusion reveals a plan and system. He reads them as an Oriental scholar reads an Arabic script… Over a part of the front where a lull reigns the eye of the observer aloft might sweep the country for signs of life and movement in vain. The maze of threadlike cracks looks deserted. The prospect seems a desolate solitude of ruined towns, roofless remains of villages, shot torn woods, and fields full of emptiness. Meanwhile on another part of the front the battle rages. There the flash of artillery is incessant. The roar of the guns rises in a hurricane of thunders… Swarms of grey human ants now creep across the ground, and now dash forwards in rushes. The lines of cracks become lines of flashing fire.
Edmund Dane, 19151
In the minds of many it is the bloody Western Front that epitomizes World War I of 1914–18, and the essential character of that archetype is the trench war. Our common vision is that of Tommy, Fritz and the French Poilu ‘eye deep in hell’ – a chaotic misery of mud, blood and bigoted irrational stupidity, unenlightened by any strategic or tactical reason – and for whom ‘the trench’ carried an almost demonic overtone as the prime author of their suffering. Yet hindsight and pity are wonderful things. In reality trenches were designed to, and did, save lives.
The digging of trenches was a pre-planned response to the stalling of the attack. Death was far more likely to visit those who showed above the parapet or ventured boldly into No Man’s Land. As Crown Prince Wilhelm remarked, ‘Trench warfare was the natural outcome of an exhaustion brought on by a failure on both sides to develop a decisive strategy.’ Trench warfare was not just planned and systematic but eventually a cruel, even Darwinistic, breeding ground for the innovations that would finally allow the war to become ‘mobile’ once more.
Map of the Western Front. (© Osprey Publishing)