These restrictions severely limited the comfort and protection afforded to soldiers in the front line and caused Ernst Jünger to look back in the middle of 1918 with nostalgia at his accommodation at Monchy two years before, but also to reflect on the dangers of the deep dugouts:

Little can be said for the dugouts... They are what are called Siegfried dugouts, that is to say, semicircular holes, penetrating the wall of the trench to a distance of three metres and protected from above with a covering of earth, at the most two metres deep. The frame consists of thin circular sheets of corrugated iron that scarcely support the weight of the earth heaped on them and give only just room enough for two men to lie at length. … those who bivouac in them and who in their moments of rest keep their eyes fixed on the zinc roof, the mouse-trap that must infallibly crush them at the first direct hit. … Compared with earlier days, then, when we dug ourselves ten metres and more into the earth, there has been a serious decline in security. … The war has become more mobile and such works of construction no longer pay. And then it must be admitted that with the attack on Verdun the series of great onslaughts of material made the contrast between the safety of these gigantic strongholds and the front-line trenches, swept with flame and shattered with shell, far too great. But apart even from the moral factor, the occupants of these caverns, in the event of an attack, had as far to go before they could reach the trench as if they had to climb the stairs of a four-storeyed house. Thus it often happened that they had a warm reception half-way up from bombs and burning phosphorus without being able to strike a blow, particularly when the men on guard in the trench had long since given their lives in its defence without any one below being any the wiser.

Hence, after a particularly tragic disaster on Vimy Ridge, an order appeared one day that no dugout in the front line was to be more than two metres deep, and that all those already in existence were to be blown up.

What this iron order meant can be understood only by those who know the mass of stuff that, often without a break for weeks together, was flung on the trenches. To have to crouch under fire without cover, belaboured without a pause by shells of a calibre sufficient each one to lay a fair-sized village in ruins, without any distraction beyond counting the hits mechanically in a half-dazed condition, is an experience that almost passes the limits of human endurance. For this reason the men who issued the order, and threw hundreds of thousands naked and defenceless into the fire, took on themselves one of the heaviest responsibilities the mind can conceive. And yet, even though I may be one of the victims, I can but admit they were right.⁵³