#trenchwarfare

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Eyewitness Accounts of WWI

The First World War (1914-18) was the first truly global conflict and the first to be fully mechanised. Armies clashed across continents on land, in the air, and at sea. Civilians were caught up in the destruction as never before. In this article, we tell the story of WWI through the words of those who were there.

The Trenches of WWI

Despite Germany's hopes that its prepared Schlieffen Plan would win a swift victory over France and its allies, the First World War settled down on the Western Front to a static one of trench warfare. Other fronts developed in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers poured into these fronts from all sides involved in the conflict, many amongst them keen for action and eager to do their patriotic duty. The public was equally enthusiastic in the early days of the war. One French infantry officer recalls the scene as his train carrying troops to the front set off from Paris:

…without any signal, the train slowly steamed out of the station. At that moment, quite spontaneously, like a smouldering fire suddenly erupting into roaring flames, an immense clamour arose as the Marseillaise burst from a thousand throats. All the men were standing at the train's windows, waving their képis. From the track, quais and the neighbouring trains, the crowds waved back…Crowds waved back at every station, behind every barrier, and at every window along the road. Cries of 'Vive la France! Vive l'armée' could be heard everywhere, while people waved handkerchiefs and hats. The women were throwing kissed and heaped flowers on our convoy. The young men were shouting: "Au revoir! A bientôt" .

(Keegan, 72)

A similar zeal for battle was seen across the world and, undeniably, there quickly built up a pressure from peers and society to 'join up and do one's bit', as here recalled by one New Zealand soldier:

University classes emptied…sports fixtures were abandoned. To be left behind was unthinkable. If your mate was going, then somehow you had to get away too.

(Keegan, 242)

Canadian soldier Victor Wheeler recalls the impact on local French farmers as war descended on them by chance in October 1914:

With pick and shovel we dug trenches through beautiful fields of grain, fully realising what damage we were doing to the farmers' hopes of reaping small harvests that would enable them to stem hunger during the coming winter. The patriarch with his ox-drawn plough, the matronly gleaner, and the young woman gathering grass and leaves, stood arms akimbo, wordlessly, helplessly, hopelessly watching. The depressing effect on the morale of the men – to many of whom raising grain on the Western prairie also meant their livelihood – could not be easily dismissed.

(Yorke, 28)

The reality of trench warfare soon set in. Ernst Jünger, a German soldier, gives the following description of the trench he lived and fought in:

To rest in, there are dugouts, which have evolved by now from rudimentary holes in the ground to proper enclosed living quarters, with beamed ceilings and plank-cladded walls. The dugouts are about six feet high, and at a depth where there floors are roughly level with the bottom of the trench outside. In effect, there is a layer of earth on top of them thick enough to enable them to survive oblique hits. In heavy fire, though, they are death-traps…The whole thing should be pictured as a huge, ostensibly inert installation, a secret hive of industry and watchfulness, where, within a few seconds of an alarm being sounded, every man is at his post. But one shouldn't have too romantic an idea of the atmosphere, there is a certain prevailing torpor that proximity to the earth seems to engender.

(Jünger, 40-41)

Machine guns and artillery shells caused total carnage amongst infantry troops unimaginatively deployed again and again by their generals to cross the no man's land between rival trench systems. A German soldier, F. L. Cassell, recalls:

…the shout of the sentry, 'They are coming'…Helmet, belt and rifle and up the steps…in the trench a headless body. The sentry had lost his life to a last shell…there they come, the khaki-yellows, they are not twenty metres in front of our trench…They advance slowly fully equipped…machine-gun fire tears holes in their ranks.

(Keegan, 295)

In those trenches between Allied and Turkish troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula, a similar story is recorded by British soldier Vere Hamsworth in a letter home:

We spent four days in the front-line trench. We had only a few casualties. We were put there just after a big attack which had partially failed and the ground between our trench and the Turks were strewn with bodies. It strikes me that they will be there for a long time. In this the body and face turn quite black in less than 24 hours and the smell is terrific. The flies – which are everywhere – also add to the general discomfort.

(Williams, 37)

New weapons used in the trenches, like poison gas shells, caused bewilderment, dismay, and terrible deaths, as here recalled by British soldier Walter Clarke:

You didn't know, they were only just shells. But what happened, these shells when they burst they'd drop all on the floor, liquid. And in the morning the mist, there's always a mist there every morning, that was coming into the air and you were breathing it all in. Nobody knew until one or two chaps started being sick and a lot of the fellows were laying about going blind and sores all over their eyes. And then they realised what it was.

(Imperial War Museums)

The seriously wounded were taken to military hospitals behind the lines, often staffed by volunteer nurses. Britisher Daisy Spickett was one such nurse, and here she explains why she joined the medical services:

I always had in mind that I wanted to nurse and as soon as I heard of any talk of forming Red Cross Hospitals I began to make enquiries. I heard also that there was a likelihood of the War Office wanting volunteers for military hospitals, and that was what I decided I wanted. It seemed to me the only hope of getting right into the middle of everything, getting abroad and doing whatever was going, and the idea of the Army attracted me – being in the Army. But it seemed to me the thing I wanted more than anything else and that was how I put my name down for military hospitals and got my posting in July 1915.

(IWM)

Even amongst the horrors of the trenches, there were brief respites, the most remarkable being the Christmas truce of 1914, when several separate groups of soldiers along the Western Front met and exchanged gifts with the enemy. Elsewhere, messages of goodwill were simply shouted across no man's land, as here recorded by Lieutenant Edward Hulse:

…there were wafted towards us from the trenches opposite the sounds of singing and merry-making, and occasionally the guttural tones of a German were to be heard shouting out lustily, 'A happy Christmas to you Englishmen!'

(Lawson-Jones, 91)

Trench life, endured for over four years for the lucky ones, came to be seen as an unchanging past, present, and future. Daily life in the trenches was recorded with a sort of disdainful nostalgia in popular songs such as this one written by the Australian soldier and poet Tom Skeyhill:

I've a little wet home in the tench; Which the rain-storms continually drench; Blue sky overhead, Mud and clay for a bed, And a stone that we use for a bench.

Bully beef and hard biscuits we chew; Shells crackle and scare, But no place can compare With my little wet home in the trench.

(Yorke, 46)

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Trench Warfare on WWI's Western Front

The trench warfare of the Western Front during the First World War (1914-18) involved soldiers living and dying in an awful mix of mud, filth, and barbed wire. Trench systems became more sophisticated in layout as the conflict dragged on but remained rudimentary holes in the ground as entire armies attempted to shelter from artillery, gas, machine-gun, and infantry attacks. The stalemate of trench warfare was only broken in 1918 on the Western Front by the innovative use of tanks and the Allies enjoying an overwhelming numerical superiority over the enemy.

Trench Warfare

When Germany's Schlieffen plan failed to achieve a quick victory over France and that country's armed forces, with support from the British Expeditionary Force, pushed back the German advance, a situation arose where a front line was established from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Along this 475-mile (765-km) long Western Front, as it was called, neither side was able to make any significant advance on the enemy. Each side was obliged to better protect its armies by first digging simple holes and then, as the war dragged on, increasingly sophisticated networks of trenches and underground bunkers. Most trench systems involved digging into the mud to create three lines of trenches. There was a front trench, then a support trench, and finally a third reserve trench in the rear. Each trench was constructed in a long zigzag or with regular bends to ensure that if an enemy soldier managed to breach the defences, they could not simply fire along it unimpeded. The emphasis on irregularity also meant that at least some soldiers would be protected by a direct hit from shells. Various smaller trenches connected these three main trenches for the purposes of communication and supply. Communication between commanders and trench sections was achieved using telephones (with buried lines), runners, signal lamps, horns, and even pigeons.

There were machine gun posts situated at regular intervals, usually between the front and second trench lines, while the main artillery was positioned behind the reserve trench. German machine gun posts tended to be better built using concrete. Attacks by both sides involved a heavy artillery barrage followed by an infantry charge, but these rarely got beyond the front trench of the enemy before the machine gun posts and reserve units turned the tide. The trench systems became more sophisticated and deeper, especially on the German side and notably in the stretch known as the Hindenburg Line (from Arras to Laffaux). The Allies were under an obligation to remove German troops from French and Belgian territory and so launched more offensive operations, while the Germans were satisfied with holding on to what they had already gained. The German forces could choose the best defensive ground but also make attacks when an opportunity arose. Ultimately, the soldiers on both sides of the Western Front became stuck in a deadly game of attrition and survival that lasted four long years.

Often, the casualty figures in this war of attrition were horrendous. For example, 143,000 French soldiers died in the Champagne Offensive of December 1914, but the German trench system remained intact. Similarly, at the Battle of Loos in September-October 1915, the British, over three weeks, gained a two-mile (3.2 km) salient, but at the cost of 16,000 dead and 25,000 wounded. In battles like the Battle of the Somme and Battle of Passchendaele, the casualty figures were even higher. Not until the Allies used tanks and overwhelming numbers was this terrible static front finally broken in 1918.

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