Background

We have an enormous amount of evidence about life in the trenches, which shows a great variety of experiences.

General conditions

Conditions in the trenches were difficult. Millions of men and thousands of horses lived close together. Sanitation arrangements were makeshift. The smell of the trenches was appalling: rotting corpses, sewage and unwashed soldiers all combined. The soldiers were infested with lice, or ‘chats’ as they called them. (A chat was a session when they tried to delouse themselves.)

British troops did comparatively well for food and supplies. They fared better than the Germans. The mainstay of the soldier’s diet was bully beef and jam.

All soldiers on the Western Front also had to contend with the weather. In the summer the trenches were hot, dusty and smelly. In wetter weather, the soldiers spent much time up to their ankles or knees in water.

Thousands suffered from ‘trench foot’, caused by standing in freezing water for long hours. Another danger in winter was frostbite. To add to all of these unpleasant problems were the rats. Many soldiers described the huge, fat ‘corpse rats’ which thrived on the corpses and on the rubbish created by the armies. Some accounts even speak of cats and dogs killed by rats in overwhelming numbers.

However, the trenches seem to have generated a tremendous sense of comradeship between the soldiers. They shared the unpleasant conditions and the dangers, and they performed amazing feats of endurance and bravery.

Trench warfare

Trench warfare entailed a mixture of continuous raiding, patrols and sentry duty, as well as the huge set-piece battles on the Western Front.

A major assault would work something like this:

1. The attacking force lays down an artillery barrage on the enemy’s front-line trenches.
2. The attacking troops go over the top. It is now a race. The defenders must emerge from their shelters and set up their machine guns. The attackers must get through the enemy artillery and barbed wire.
3. The defenders usually have the advantage. They sweep the advancing attackers with machine guns, sometimes setting up a crossfire.
4. If the attackers do capture forward positions, they must then hold them. This generally proves virtually impossible.

This extract from Erich Remarque’s book All Quiet on the Western Front evokes something of the atmosphere of trench warfare:

‘Suddenly the nearer explosions cease. The shelling continues but it has lifted and falls behind us, our trench is free. We seize the hand grenades, pitch them out in front of the dug-out and jump after them ... The attack has come ... The wire entanglements are torn to pieces. Yet they offer some obstacle. Machine guns rattle, rifles crack ...

‘We retreat, pull wire cradles into the trench and leave bombs behind us. The machine guns are already firing from the next position ... The forward trenches have been abandoned ... They are blown to pieces ...

‘At last we reach a trench that is in somewhat better condition. It is manned and ready for the counter attack ... Our guns open in full blast and cut off the enemy attack ... It does not come quite to hand to hand fighting; they are driven back. We arrive once again at our shattered trench and pass on beyond it ...

‘We are so close on the heels of our retreating enemies that we reach their line almost at the same time as they do ... The fight ceases. We lose touch with the enemy. We cannot stay here long, but must retire under cover of our artillery to our own position ... We get back pretty well. There is no further attack by the enemy.’

Officers and men

One of the great controversies of the Great War is the question of whether the officers could have done more to limit the huge numbers of casualties. This view of trench warfare, expressed by a private in 1916, is typical of the popular view:

‘I do not know why the various occasions on which battalions have fought till there were merely a few score survivors have not been properly chronicled ... Certain platoons or companies fought shoulder to shoulder till the last man dropped ... or ... were shelled to nothingness, or getting over the top ... went forward till they all withered away under machine gun fire ... A fortnight after some exploit, a field-marshal or divisional general comes down to a battalion to thank it for its gallant conduct, and fancies for a moment, perchance, that he is looking at the men who did the deed of valour, and not a large draft that has just been brought up from England and the base to fill the gap. He should ask the services of the chaplain and make his congratulations in the graveyard or go to the hospital and make them there.’

However, most military historians dispute this image. General Haig, perhaps the commander with the worst reputation of all coming out of the war, maintained that the myth of ‘lions led by donkeys’ came from Lloyd George. As British Prime Minister for most of the war, Lloyd George was anxious to dissociate himself from the carnage of the war. He quickly and astutely published his war memoirs. These provided the basis for later interpretations of the war. In them he vilified most of the military commanders, and Haig in particular. Writer and military historian Terry Norman wrote:

‘Read any autobiographies by Great War front line veterans and whenever staff officers are mentioned, it is usually in the form of ribald comment or downright abuse. Generally applied with a thick brush, such castigation painted all staff officers alike ... A distorted and unfair picture, perhaps, but front line soldiers daily faced the stark reality of living or dying; and the anonymous men who influenced their fragile existence always seemed so far from the immediate danger. Yet even front line soldiers would admit that there were exceptions amongst staff personnel.’

In his book The Great War: Myth and Reality, DE Marshall reinforced this point:

‘The generals of the Great War have usually been portrayed as stupid and obstinate, blind to the significance of new weapons, brutal in their disregard for the losses their armies suffered, and blinkered in their inability to appreciate the opportunities to escape the deadlock on the Western Front ... Is this true? Were all the generals dimwitted?
It is true that few people expected the war to take the form that it did, but no such war had ever been fought before ... Look at some of the problems with which the generals were faced:

1. The first war with air power
2. The first motorised war
3. The first war to use wireless telegraphy
4. The first great artillery war
5. The first chemical war
6. The first war of modern mass production
7. The only war without voice control

It is important to ask questions about this. Could other leaders have acted differently? Should the commanders have been in the trenches with their men? The truth is that fairly senior officers (majors and even colonels) did take part in the fighting. There was no solution to the problems of mobility. Horses were too vulnerable in trench warfare, which meant that cavalry were soon obsolete. Tanks and armoured cars were too few and too unreliable even by 1918 to bring back mobility. Another central problem was that of communication. In the Second World War there were personal radios which kept commanders and troops in contact. Before the Great War, voice command or errand riders performed this function. But in the Great War, errand riders were too vulnerable and hand-held radios did not exist. Commanders had to formulate a plan and stick to it.

Views of the War

Soldiers in the Great War went through an enormous range of experiences.

In the trenches, their feelings could range from extreme boredom to the appalling stress of an enemy bombardment or attack.

Soldiers spent many long hours sitting around, and could spend months without seeing the enemy. Many more long hours were spent digging and repairing trenches, moving supplies or burying the dead. To pass the hours, many soldiers even took up correspondence courses; and the card game 'pelmanism' was popular.

Yet the soldiers were in constant danger. The enemy could launch an artillery bombardment at almost any time. Erich Remarque’s powerful book All Quiet on the Western Front describes this:

‘Fourteen days ago we had to go up and relieve the front line. It was fairly quiet on our sector, so the quartermaster who remained in the rear had ... provided for the full company of one hundred and fifty men. But on the last day an astonishing number of English heavies opened up on us with high explosive, drumming ceaselessly on our position, so that we suffered severely and came back only eighty strong.’

Although machine guns and gas are often mentioned as causing casualties, the majority of casualties were caused by artillery. Death and injury came almost without warning, burying soldiers under tons of earth or leaving smashed bodies and wrecked trenches.

This led to another problem for the soldier. No war like this had ever been fought; and the civilians, even the soldier’s family, could not understand the experiences the soldier went through. This problem was made worse by the censorship and propaganda at home. There is evidence that the soldiers found the way artists and newspapers reported events rather hard to believe. Robert Graves wrote about this issue:

‘Propaganda reports of atrocities were, it was agreed, ridiculous ... We no longer believe the highly coloured accounts of German atrocities in Belgium ... The troops with the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners were the Canadians. The Canadians’ motive was said to be revenge for a Canadian found crucified with bayonets through his hands and feet in a German trench.’

Billy Congreve, an outstanding officer killed by a sniper in 1916, wrote similarly in his diary:

‘It is all rot the stuff one reads in the papers about the inferiority of the German soldiers to ours. If anything, the German is the better, for though we are undoubtedly the more dogged and impossible to beat, they are the more highly disciplined.’