The war in the trenches

Most people thought that the war would be short and 'over by Christmas'. It would be a war of dashing cavalry charges and heroic deeds. One poet, Philip Larkin, later described the long queues of young men waiting patiently to enlist, 'grinning as if it were all an August Bank Holiday lark'. But military experts had failed to consider just how difficult it would be to defeat an enemy concealed in deep trenches, protected by endless coils of barbed wire and machine guns firing eight bullets a second. Both sides were evenly matched and dug in during the winter of 1914/15. Each was unable to break through the other's line.

The Western Front stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. It consisted of a series of trenches on each side. The front line trenches were backed by support trenches and after them came the reserve trenches. In some places the Allied trenches were only 100 metres from the German ones. This can clearly be seen in the preserved trenches at Vimy Ridge in France, though here the positions marked as 'front lines' are more accurately described as observation posts. For three years before the final offensive of 1918 the Western Front did not shift more than about ten miles each way as each side drove the other back; only to be driven back in turn by an enemy counter attack.

Trenches were usually about 2.5 metres deep with a wooden duckboard running along the bottom to keep the troops' feet out of the mud and water that collected in the 'sump' at the bottom. In wet weather, and especially in Flanders in Belgium, the water and mud would often cover the soldiers' feet, leading to 'trench foot'. This meant that the soldiers' feet went numb and could eventually lead to the amputation of toes or even the foot itself. During the course of the war 75,000 British troops were admitted to hospital with trench foot or frost-bite. To prevent this, troops had to change into dry socks every day and rub foul-smelling whale oil into their feet to act as a waterproofing agent. The officers made sure this was done since some men tried to get trench foot as a means of being invalided out of the war.

Trenches were also dug in a zigzag and not in straight lines. This made them harder to capture since if one end of a trench was occupied by the enemy, they could not simply fire down the whole length of the trench. Often forward positions, thirty or more metres in front of the trenches, were established. These were called forward saps or listening posts. In these, men would listen at night for sounds of enemy patrols or underground miners digging tunnels to lay explosive charges underneath their trenches.

Neil Demarco: Britain and the Great War; Oxford University Press, 1992/2000, page 10 f.