Chapter 7
Welcome to the World of the Trenches
In This Chapter
Finding your way around the trenches
Attacking enemy trenches
Coming face to face with the harsh realities of army discipline
When soldiers in the First World War went home on leave, they often found that they couldn’t talk about life at the front: the world of the trenches was so different from anything civilians, or even old soldiers, had experienced that it wasn’t worth even trying to describe it. They could only talk about it with other people who’d been there.
The world of the trenches was what made the First World War different from any war before or since. Nothing in the men’s training or experience could prepare them for the world that awaited them at the front. At its worst, trench warfare produced battered and barren landscapes that looked like the surface of the moon, or else the guns churned rain-sodden ground into thick mud deep enough to drown in. But the trenches also created a strong sense of camaraderie among the men who lived there – even between soldiers on different sides. Elsewhere in this book I concentrate on the generals and leaders who took the big decisions about who to fight and where, but in this chapter I introduce you to the ordinary men who fought in the trenches and give you a guided tour of their world.
The last survivors of the First World War trenches died as recently as the 2000s, and it’s a safe bet that many people reading this book have an ancestor who served their country in the trenches. These men’s story is part of your own.
Negotiating the Trenches of the Western Front
Soldiers arriving at the Western Front – on either side – usually spent a few weeks in a training camp familiarising themselves with the conditions in which they’d be fighting before being sent up the line to the Front. They needed a period of acclimatising themselves because trench warfare was so different to anything that any soldiers had seen before. Men still needed to know how to attack across a battlefield and how to shoot straight, but much of their drill sergeants’ previous experience of warfare was irrelevant to conditions in the trenches.
Navigating state-of-the-art trench systems
Trenches were dug in all the European theatres of war, but they were most extensive on the Western Front. The enormous line of opposing trenches that formed the Western Front stretched all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel (see Chapter 4 to find out how this situation came about), running through farmland, woodland and villages, and even over mountains. The sector of the line manned by British, Empire and Belgian troops lay in northern France and a small corner of Belgium around the town of Ypres; the rest was in French hands. Portuguese troops also served on the Western Front. In 1918 large numbers of American troops arrived, though by then the war had moved out of the trenches and become a war of movement again (Chapter 16 explains why). Ranged against these Allied troops, for the full length of the Front, were the Germans.
The area between the two lines of trenches was known as no-man’s-land, because no one could claim to control it. Sometimes no-man’s-land was quite wide, but in some sections the two lines of trenches were so close that the troops could hear each other’s conversations. In one sector the two sides actually shared a single line of barbed wire and took turns to check it for any damage!
The Western Front was more than just two continuous trenches facing each other, though; a whole trench system existed behind both (see Figure 7-1). A trench system usually consisted of two or three parallel lines of trenches, with communications trenches running at right angles between them. Communications trenches ran right to the rear, which was where men entered the trench system. Communications trenches could get badly crowded, especially when men were gathering for an attack.
Figure 7-1: The layout of a typical trench system.
Trenches were built in a zigzag pattern, like the battlements of a castle, so that the men always had corners to hide around should the enemy get into the trench. Zigzag trenches were also less likely to collapse if a shell hit them. However, zigzags made it easy to get lost, so trenches usually had plenty of signs pointing the way to different parts of the front line. The soldiers used to give names to different parts of their trench system, such as Hyde Park Corner or Piccadilly Circus, which helped them to orientate themselves and gave them a little touch of home.
The trenches also had to be deep enough to protect the men in them, so you needed to stand on a firestep if you wanted to fire your rifle at the enemy. Deeper down into the earth were the dugouts, which were like underground rooms where the troops could spend their time when they weren’t on duty. The best trenches (which tended to be the German ones) were lined with wooden planks and had solid wooden floors; most British trenches had to make do with wooden duckboards (slatted wooden boards) to walk on.
In front of the trenches lay a long line of barbed wire – not just a few strands, as you might see today around a sheep pen: First World War barbed wire was made up of several strands, held up by long metal pegs stuck into the ground. The idea was that any attacker would have a real job trying to cut through the wire and might easily get stuck on it, making him an easy target for the defenders to fire at. Barbed wire was supposed to hinder the enemy, but it could also be fatal to its own side. When troops gathered for an attack, they had to get through their own barbed wire first, so they’d cut a passage through it. But that meant that the enemy machine gunners just needed to aim at any gap they spotted in the wire to decimate the attacking force before it even left its own lines.
Keeping the trench lines supplied was a major operation. Electricity supplies were needed for lights and telephones, as was a constant supply of food, equipment and ammunition for the soldiers. Getting supplies through to where they were needed wasn’t the most glamorous job in the army, but it was absolutely vital. The men who supplied and supported the front-line troops came from all over Britain’s Empire, including many from the British West Indies and a Chinese Labour Corps. Their essential contribution to the war needs to be remembered.
Smoking can seriously damage your health. No, seriously
When in their trenches, the soldiers were below ground level, so they were protected from rifle and machine gun fire, if not from shells. But to attack the enemy and advance, soldiers had to show themselves above the parapet (going ‘over the top’, as it was called). Even just putting your head above the trench parapet, however, whether to fire your rifle or just to have a look at what was going on, was extremely dangerous: a sniper could hit you within a split second. It was much safer to use a periscope; some rifles even had clever devices so you could fire them from down in the trench using a periscope to aim them and a complicated bit of mechanism to pull the trigger.
From the outset of the war, so many men suffered head injuries from being shot when putting their heads above the parapet that in 1915 the French authorities issued their soldiers with steel helmets; the British followed suit in 1916. In the same year, the Germans dropped their decorative pointed Pickelhaube helmets in favour of the more practical ‘coal scuttle’ helmets that were to become very familiar in the Second World War. Steel helmets offered protection against the effects of artillery, but unless they were heavily reinforced (which made them very heavy to wear) they offered little protection against a direct hit from a sniper.
Going over the top was dangerous enough, but soldiers usually had to carry heavy packs on their backs as well as their weapons. Imagine running a cross-country race with a heavy rucksack on your back and you have an idea of what these men had to do (and that’s without people firing at you!). Enemy snipers often used to aim first at the officers: they were easy to spot because they tended to carry pistols rather than rifles and usually didn’t have a heavy pack to carry.
Even after darkness fell on a battlefield, the trenches were a dangerous place to be. The enemy might send up a flare that would light up the whole area, allowing his snipers to pick off men who’d been hidden in the dark. Even smoking in your own trench could be dangerous.
Smoking was fashionable at the time and many men found it calmed their nerves. (In those days many doctors even recommended smoking, saying it was good for the lungs!) However, soldiers who lit up after dark had to be very careful: at the first drag on the cigarette the enemy sniper might see you; when you took a second drag, he’d take aim; when you took a third, he’d fire. For years afterwards men who’d been in the trenches would only take two drags on a cigarette before throwing it away.
The dangers of rain and mud
One of the most deadly enemies the men in the trenches faced was rain. If trenches weren’t properly drained – and most of them weren’t – the men found themselves standing for months on end ankle-deep in water. They often developed a very nasty fungal condition called trench foot, which caused the foot to swell and blister and, if untreated, could develop into gangrene. In the worst cases, the foot had to be amputated. To try to catch cases before they became serious, officers undertook regular foot inspections, looking carefully at their men’s naked feet for bad sores, blisters or signs of decay. It probably wasn’t the sort of glamorous leadership role many young cadets had in mind when they joined up (and it can’t have been what the men were expecting either), but it was a vital task if the troops were to be kept fit and in fighting condition.
Heavy rain – and the First World War saw some very heavy rain – could turn a battlefield into a swamp, especially when it was being churned up by constant shelling. The mud sometimes got so deep that men who fell into it drowned and the only way to cross it was on wooden duckboards. Horses couldn’t move in it and guns sank into it, and even if they could fire their shells sank, which seriously reduced their effectiveness. Whole battles got bogged down in the thick mud of the Western Front, such as the later stages of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 (see Chapters 6 and 15). Pictures of men in a wasteland of mud from battles such as these have become some of the most familiar iconic images of the war (see Figure 7-2).
© Imperial War Museums (CO 2215)
Figure 7-2: Canadian stretcher-bearers coping with the thick mud at Passchendaele in 1917.
No pets allowed – except lice and rats
A trench, even one with wooden walls and walkways, is basically a ditch in a field, and it’s no surprise that the trenches were soon overrun with unwelcome wildlife. Unpleasant as it was for them at first, the men soon got used to having lice in their hair, though it came as quite a shock to civilians when the men came home on leave and inadvertently deposited their little companions on the furniture.
The trenches were home to plenty of rats too, and the men used to enjoy hunting them when they’d nothing better to do, which was often.
The bore war
Many people imagine that army life is all made up of action, and that’s certainly how many volunteers imagined it when they joined up in 1914. What they found, however, was that most of the time they spent in the trenches was actually rather boring. They weren’t being shelled or gassed or shot at or sent over the top all the time.
Unless they were sent to a hotspot such as Ypres, where the shelling was pretty much constant, most soldiers could expect to pass most of their time in a quiet sector of the line where nothing much was happening. In these sectors life might consist of long periods on duty in the trenches, waiting and watching in case anything happened. To liven things up and keep the men on their toes, the officers would often order a patrol into no-man’s-land or a raid on the enemy trenches (see the later ‘How to raid your enemy’s trench’ section for some idea of what these raids entailed).
When off duty, the men could take time out behind the lines, visiting the nearest towns that weren’t in ruins, and going to cafes or bars. Ordinary life had to go on too: the men had meals to cook, clothes to wash, and letters to read and write. Life in the trenches became a strange balance between periods of danger and suffering and a sort of extended weekend away.
In quiet sectors of the front, the two sides would shout out the occasional jokes to each other, fire a few shots from time to time (often at a set time so everyone knew to take cover) and generally carry on with things until orders arrived to get ready for an attack (life quickly became a lot less boring then).
How quiet your sector of the line would be depended on which enemy troops you were up against. All armies contained some regiments that got a reputation for being fairly easy-going; others were more hard-nosed. The Allied troops were always pleased to have the Bavarians facing them from the German trenches, because the Bavarians were happy to live and let live; Prussian regiments, on the other hand, were more aggressive. At the time of the Christmas Truce in 1914 (see Chapter 4), British and German soldiers met in the middle of no-man’s-land and played football, but some of the Scottish regiments were less inclined to fraternise with the men who’d been shelling them for the past four months and kept the fighting going, Christmas or no Christmas.
Getting Out of the Trench Trap
The trench warfare of the Western Front posed some very difficult questions for the soldiers on both sides. Throughout the history of warfare armies had had to attack heavily fortified positions, and doing so often meant taking heavy losses, but it was still usually possible for the attackers to win in the end. But an unbroken line of trenches like the Western Front was simply without precedent: nothing quite like it had ever happened before. So the generals had to experiment and try out new tactics and new technology ‒ anything that would allow their men to break through the enemy lines so they could all start fighting properly again.
How to raid your enemy’s trench
In between the big battles (Chapter 6 tells you about some of those) the men on the Western Front sometimes launched raids on the enemy’s trench, usually in order to take a few prisoners and get information from them. Here’s what the men who carried out these daring raids were told to do:
- Launch your raid at night. And avoid moonlit nights.
Just be aware that raiding at night also increases the likelihood of men on your own side shooting each other by mistake in the dark.
- Don’t take heavy packs on your backs.
Keep those for major offensives. On a raid, you might need to crawl under the wire.
- Use grenades to clear enemy dugouts and keep track of how many you’ve thrown.
Don’t throw two grenades and go in after the first explosion. Remember the second one!
- Have some spiked clubs and knives handy – trenches may be too cramped for using your rifle and bayonet.
Some of the weapons you may need to use in trench fighting might not have looked out of place on a medieval battlefield, but they have their uses.
- Don’t forget to take some prisoners.
It would defeat the whole point of the raid if you just shot every enemy you met!
Raids such as these could provide valuable information about how the enemy was deploying his troops and what his plans might be. Raiders might even be lucky enough to seize some enemy plans or instructions. All this information would be fed back to headquarters, where it could help the generals plan much bigger attacks on the enemy’s line.
How to attack your enemy’s line
The generals on both sides of the war spent most of their time trying to crack the conundrum of how to successfully attack the enemy line. The heavy casualties of the 1916 battles at Verdun and on the Somme (see Chapter 6) showed what could happen if they got this wrong.
Here are some of the most common tactics employed on the Western Front:
Use aircraft spotters to pinpoint where the enemy guns and defences are.
Properly used, air reconnaissance could make all the difference between a successful attack and a failure. As long as your pilots didn’t get shot down, of course.
- Begin the attack with a heavy preliminary bombardment of the enemy lines.
Most generals thought this was essential in order to weaken the enemy defences and give the attacking infantry – the soldiers advancing on foot – a chance. Unfortunately, even the heaviest bombardments had several weaknesses:
- Shelling couldn’t destroy the very deepest dugouts, which is where the enemy sheltered.
- Shelling couldn’t destroy barbed wire.
- Huge numbers of shells – perhaps as many as a third – turned out to be duds.
- Many shells landed in soft, muddy ground, where their impact was much reduced (even though the explosions looked impressive on film).
- Too many shells were shrapnel, which was designed to hit people, rather than high explosives, which would blow up enemy positions.
- Too many shells were aimed at the enemy trenches rather than at the enemy’s guns, which posed the real threat to the attack.
- To be effective, artillery – that is, heavy guns – needed to be heavily concentrated against relatively small stretches of the enemy line. Big attacks, such as the Somme, simply didn’t have enough guns for the huge area they covered.
- Gather your troops for the attack as quietly and discreetly as possible.
The most deadly enemy wasn’t in fact enemy machine guns aimed at advancing troops, but enemy shelling of forward trenches that were densely packed with troops waiting to go over the top.
- Send the troops over the top at a precise time. And tell them to walk, not run.
Telling the men to walk wasn’t as crazy as it might sound. If men ran, they could end up at the enemy line all at different times, and it would be easy for the enemy to pick them off individually. Going forwards at a steady pace was the best way to ensure the whole attacking line arrived together, with maximum impact.
- Use gas to cover your attack.
Just make sure the wind isn’t blowing the gas back into your own trenches.
- As soon as your men have taken their objectives, send the second wave in fast.
Don’t forget that the enemy might have fallen back to a much stronger position that you probably won’t have shelled, so your second wave could still be as vulnerable as the first.
Going underground
Both sides sometimes used a deadly variant on the usual preliminary bombardment: they planted mines deep underneath the enemy’s trenches. The British did this at the opening of the Battle of the Somme, and in 1917 mines were crucial to the successful British attack at Messines (the details are in Chapter 15).
Digging mines under the enemy lines was nothing new: mines had been used to great effect in the American Civil War. However, the mines of the First World War were bigger and more devastating than any that had been used before.
Digging and planting these mines was the job of the tunnellers, men recruited from the coalfields to dig tunnels deep under no-man’s-land and beneath the other side’s front line. The work was difficult and dangerous and had to be carried out as quietly as possible, because each side knew what the other was up to and had listening devices to pick up the sound of digging. Sometimes British and German tunnellers were digging within a few feet of each other; sometimes their tunnels even met and the men had to fight it out underground. Even if they managed to dig their way to the correct position, they had to carry the explosives there without any going off prematurely.
The tunnellers had one of the toughest and most dangerous jobs in the entire Western Front and they knew it. They tended to be more independently minded and less respectful of authority than other soldiers, and most Tommies learned to treat them with respect – and some caution.
Dealing with Men Who Couldn’t – or Wouldn’t – Fight
The First World War saw a huge number of casualties: the maimed, the wounded, the psychologically scarred and the dead. Medical personnel were often overwhelmed by the numbers of casualties they were dealing with. As well as casualties of the fighting, armies also had to deal with men whose will to carry on snapped under the pressure of the trenches. Sometimes the effects of living under constant bombardment drove men mad, but sometimes they were only too sane and had simply had enough of the conditions in which they were expected to live. Armies also had to deal with soldiers from the other side who gave up and surrendered.
Tending to wounds and the wounded
When men were wounded, they were taken to a casualty clearing station, normally positioned near a railway station behind the front lines. The surgeons there would deal with any lightly wounded, so that they could go back to the front line quickly; more serious cases were sent by rail or road to the military hospitals farther behind the lines or else back in the home country (see Figure 5 in the insert section).
During the First World War military medical services adopted the triage system, dividing the wounded into three groups:
- Those who would be able to recover, given treatment and time
- Those who were permanently wounded and wouldn’t be able to fight again (men who’d lost limbs, for example, fell into this category)
- Those who were too badly wounded to be saved
Men in the first two categories were sent on to hospital; men in the third were quietly left on one side to die.
Many soldiers quite liked the idea of being sent home as a casualty. British soldiers used to refer to it as getting a ‘blighty wound’ (blighty was a word picked up by British soldiers in India meaning ‘home’, and soldiers in the trenches used it to refer to Britain). Sometimes soldiers deliberately wounded themselves, hoping to get shipped home, but this was a dangerous game: the punishment for deliberate wounding was severe (see the later section ‘Dealing with mutineers and deserters’). The French, in particular, were ruthless in having anyone who deserted or tried to maim himself shot.
Those who died were buried behind the lines, often in huge pits – when their bodies were recovered, that is: thousands of men from all armies were killed but their bodies were never recovered, or else they were so blown to pieces that they couldn’t be identified. These men were officially listed as ‘missing’, though everyone knew that usually meant ‘dead’. (I deal with the way the dead were buried and the memorials that were put up to honour them in Chapter 18.)
Mending minds
One area of medicine where big advances were made in the First World War was in psychiatric care. The terrible shelling on the battlefields badly shook the nerves of many soldiers and they developed psychiatric symptoms of what nowadays is recognised as post-traumatic stress disorder but which in those days was called shell shock. At first many officers thought the men were just being cowards, but gradually people understood more about the psychological impact of exposure to prolonged periods of heavy shelling.
At Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh a pioneering military doctor, Captain William Rivers, developed a ‘talking cure’ for his patients. As well as being given the opportunity for sport or hobbies, they were encouraged to talk openly about their feelings and fears as a way of overcoming them. Greater understanding of psychological trauma was one of the most important medical advances of the war.
Dealing with mutineers and deserters
It can be difficult nowadays to understand why so many young men went off to war so eagerly in 1914, but it can be even more difficult to understand how they were able to put up with conditions in the trenches for so long without doing something to protest.
Soldiers often went off to war full of belief in their country and its cause, but this sort of patriotism often changed subtly when they arrived at the front. There, they often forged strong bonds with the other men in their units, and if you asked them why they were fighting, they’d have said they were fighting mainly for their pals: you look out for your comrade-in-arms and he looks out for you. Some soldiers retained a sense of what the war was meant to be about, but many, in all armies, sat in the trenches and obeyed orders because that’s where they were and what they were there to do. (As one British song put it, sung to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere, because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere … ’.) Ultimately, though, some soldiers were driven to desert or mutiny.
I’ve had enough of this for a game of soldiers
Sometimes, even looking out for his pals wasn’t enough to keep a soldier in his post: thousands of men deserted (that is, ran away). In all armies, the punishment for desertion in the face of the enemy was death, so men had to have a pretty good reason for undertaking such a risky and dangerous act. Sometimes, they’d just had enough of conditions in the trenches and wanted to go home: after all, if they stayed in the trenches they’d probably get killed anyway, so it must have seemed worth the risk. Sometimes, soldiers with impeccable records of good service simply couldn’t take any more and snapped mentally.
Sometimes, men got lost on the battlefield and ended up a long distance from their units: doing this could also get you accused of being a deserter.
Mutiny!
Mutiny is an even more serious military offence than desertion. Mutiny is the deliberate defiance of military order and rejection of military authority, and it’s almost always punishable by death.
Almost every army of the Great Powers in the war rose in mutiny at some point during the war: the major exception was the British army. (The Americans didn’t face mutiny either, but they were involved in fighting only in the final months of the war.) A riot did break out at the main British transit camp at Etaples in 1917, but it was a protest about conditions at a nearby training camp, not about conditions in the trenches, and it was soon put down. But after a major offensive had gone disastrously wrong in 1917, the French army mutinied. They’d defend their trenches against the Germans, the soldiers said, but they absolutely refused to take part in any more badly-planned attacks. By the end of 1918, German and Austrian soldiers felt the same: they weren’t going to risk their lives in more attacks to support what they could see by then was a lost cause.
Probably the most serious outbreaks of mutiny came in the Russian army during 1916. The Russians had suffered appallingly in the war, and much of their hardships had been the result of their own leaders’ incompetence and callous attitude towards them. By 1916, the Russians were deserting in their thousands: whole units just got out of their trenches and headed home. These mutinies were very dangerous: the soldiers would simply kill any officer who tried to stop them. The mutinies in the Russian army were a symptom of the revolution that would break out in 1917.
Sentenced to death
Armies had some very severe punishments for men who broke the rules. In the British army in particular, punishments were quite antiquated. Flogging had long been abolished, but soldiers who were found guilty of minor misdemeanours, such as being drunk or asleep on duty, could be given Field Punishment No. 1, which meant being tied to an upright post or wheel for two hours a day (usually, an hour in the morning and another hour in the evening), sometimes – or so it has been alleged – within range of enemy fire. More serious offences in all armies, such as striking an officer, deliberately wounding yourself (including deliberately allowing yourself to be wounded by the enemy) or desertion, were punishable by death.
Military offences are tried by a special military court known as a court martial. A panel of senior officers acts as judge (there’s no jury) and officers, usually with a background in the law, present the case for the prosecution and the defence. The courts martial of the First World War were supposed to judge cases by the evidence, but they were run by serving officers who also had to bear general army discipline in mind when they decided on a defendant’s guilt or innocence, and on what sentence to impose. A few executions were often thought to be a good way to concentrate men’s minds on their duty, something for which the French and Italian armies were particularly notorious.
Executions ordered by courts martial were usually carried out by firing squad. Soldiers never liked taking part in firing squads, especially when, as sometimes happened, the prisoner was suffering from shellshock or had just got too scared to know what he was doing. One of the firing squad rifles was always loaded with a blank, so each man could think he hadn’t killed the prisoner, though a real bullet gave much more of a kickback against the shoulder, so the men usually knew.
Sometimes a death sentence was suspended, which meant that the man went back to the front line but if he committed any further offences, however minor, the death sentence would be enacted. That way he could still fight but he was unlikely to cause any more trouble. Rather than face a firing squad, many deserters preferred to try to get themselves taken prisoner by the Germans (and German deserters did the same).
No prisoners?
The Geneva Convention, the internationally agreed set of rules for conducting warfare, was quite clear on how prisoners should be treated: as soon as a soldier laid down his arms and gave himself up to the enemy he was a prisoner of war, and should be treated properly. That, at least, was the theory. In reality, if you surrendered on the battlefield you were quite likely to get shot: soldiers of all armies reckoned that shooting prisoners was a lot less trouble than having to keep an eye on them and get them back behind the lines in one piece. And if anyone asked awkward questions, you could always claim they’d been trying to escape.
Shooting prisoners wasn’t just against international law: it may even have prolonged the war. Soldiers were much more likely to fight on when they thought they’d be shot if they surrendered: this may help to explain why no mass surrenders took place on either side even after terrible battles such as Verdun or Passchendaele (see Chapters 6 and 15). On the other hand, when the German army started to collapse at the end of the war (see Chapter 16), the fact that the first Germans to surrender were properly treated encouraged other Germans to surrender too.