Life in the Trenches, 1914-1919 World War I was a war of trenches. After the early war of movement in the late summer of 1914, artillery and machine guns forced the armies on the Western Front to dig trenches to protect themselves. Fighting ground to a stalemate. Over the next four years, both sides would launch attacks against the enemy’s trench lines, attacks that resulted in horrific casualties. Inside a trench, all that is visible is just a few feet on either side, ending
at the trench walls in front and back, with a patch of leaden sky visible above. Trenches in WWI were constructed with sandbags, wooden planks, woven sticks, tangled barbed wire or even just stinking mud. Despite the use of wooden plank ‘duckboards’ and sandbags to keep out the water, soldiers on the front lines lived mired in mud. “The mud in Belgium varies in consistency from water to about the thickness of dough ready for the oven,” one British infantry soldier wrote. The
constant damp often led to a condition known as ‘trenchfoot,’ which if left untreated, could require amputation to stave off severe infection or even death. Trenches became trash dumps of the detritus of war: broken ammunition boxes, empty cartridges, torn uniforms, shattered helmets, soiled bandages, shrapnel balls, bone fragments. Trenches were also places of despair, becoming long graves when they collapsed from the weight of the war. ‘No-man’s land,’ was an
ancient term that gained terrible new meaning during WWI. The constant bombardment of modern artillery and rapid firing of machine guns created a nightmarish wasteland between the enemies’ lines, littered with tree stumps and snarls of barbed wire. In battle, soldiers had to charge out of the trenches and across no-man’s land into a hail of bullets and shrapnel and poison gas. They were easy targets and casualties were enormously high. By the end of 1914, after just five months of fighting, the
number of dead and wounded exceeded four million men. The trench systems on the Western Front were roughly 475 miles long, stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps, although not in a continuous line. Though trenches offered some protection, they were still incredibly dangerous, as soldiers easily became trapped or killed because of direct hits from artillery fire.
- Introduction & Top Questions
- Forces and resources of the combatant nations in 1914
- Technology of war in 1914
- Initial strategies
- The Schlieffen Plan
- Eastern Front strategy, 1914
- The strategy of the Western Allies, 1914
- The war in the west, 1914
- The German invasion
- The First Battle of the Marne
- The Eastern and other fronts, 1914
- The war in the east, 1914
- The Serbian campaign, 1914
- The Turkish entry
- The war at sea, 1914–15
- The loss of the German colonies
- Initial strategies
- Rival strategies and the Dardanelles campaign, 1915–16
- The Western and Eastern fronts, 1915
- The Western Front, 1915
- The Eastern Front, 1915
- Other fronts, 1915–16
- The Caucasus, 1914–16
- Mesopotamia, 1914–April 1916
- The Egyptian frontiers, 1915–July 1917
- Italy and the Italian front, 1915–16
- Serbia and the Salonika expedition, 1915–17
- Major developments in 1916
- The Western Front, 1916
- The Battle of Jutland
- The Eastern Front, 1916
- German strategy and the submarine war, 1916–January 1917
- Peace moves and U.S. policy to February 1917
- Developments in 1917
- The Western Front, January–May 1917
- The U.S. entry into the war
- The Russian revolutions and the Eastern Front, March 1917–March 1918
- Greek affairs
- Caporetto
- Mesopotamia, summer 1916–winter 1917
- Palestine, autumn 1917
- The Western Front, June–December 1917
- The Far East
- Naval operations, 1917–18
- Air warfare
- Peace moves, March 1917–September 1918
- The Western Front, March–September 1918
- Other developments in 1918
- Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Poles
- Eastern Europe and the Russian periphery, March–November 1918
- The Balkan front, 1918
- The Turkish fronts, 1918
- Vittorio Veneto
- The collapse of Austria-Hungary
- The final offensive on the Western Front
- The end of the German war
- The Armistice
- Killed, wounded, and missing
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