World War I

Life in the Trenches

All for One and One for All

The First YearIn the first year of the war, the soldiers on both sides thought of this as an adventure – it would all be over by Christmas. As such, they behaved with a certain human decorum that the senior officers simply could not allow.

After this event the senior officers made it a court martial offence to “fraternize with the enemy”. Never again has a Christmas truce been declared.

Overall Conditions

• Overall the conditions that the soldiers lived in was terrible.

• In addition to all the conditions of war (shells dropping on them, snipers picking them off, charges across no-man’s land, etc), they also lived in mud.– The four years of the war were four of the

wettest in France’s history. All the dirt that was churned up by the battles was then turned into mud by the rain.

Overall Conditions

• The food did not always make it up to the front lines, so the soldiers were always hungry.

• They often had to rely on hard tack, bully beef and weak tea for days

• They were always wet and dirty. This seems like a minor complaint, but it led to some very severe physical problems.

Body Lice

• Because the men were always dirty and had to wear the same clothes day and night for weeks or months at a time, they all suffered from lice.

• The lice left blotchy red marks all over the body, caused terrible itching, and caused the men’s bodies to take on a sour, stale smell.

Body Lice

• The lice also carried diseases. Fifteen percent of all “sick call” cases in the British army were the result of “Trench Fever” – caused by lice.

• Pyrrexhia (Trench Fever) caused shooting pains in the legs, followed by a very high fever. This was not fatal, but it was painful.

Body Lice

• Men used various methods to try to get rid of the lice, but nothing worked. Enough eggs always remained that within a few hours of wearing, the lice would be back.

• Running a hot stone or iron over the seams of the clothes often killed many of the eggs – but never all of them.

Body Lice

• Soldiers tried burning the lice with a candle – a tricky job if you aren’t practiced.

• The army provided “de-lousing” chambers where men could immerse the clothes in a chemical bath.

Body Lice

• The men often passed the time by pinching the lice between their fingers.

Trench Rats

• Because so many men died on the front, they were buried pretty much wherever they fell – if they were buried at all.

• The smell of the putrid rotting flesh was merely something the soldiers had to learn to deal with.

• The large amount of dead flesh attracted rats.

Trench Rats

• Rats feasted on the decomposing corpses of the dead soldiers.

• They more they ate, the larger they became.

• The rats could produce up to 880 offspring in one year, so the trenches were teaming with vermin.

Trench Rats

• The rats were more than an irritant to the soldiers – they drove them mad with frustration.

• Soldiers caught shooting rats could be charged with wasting ammunition.

Trench Rats

• One soldier describes his most horrific war memory thusly: “I saw some rats running from under the dead men’s greatcoats, enormous rats, fat with human flesh. My heart pounded as we edged towards one of the bodies. His helmet had rolled off. The man displayed a grimacing face, stripped of flesh; the skull bare, the eyes devoured and from the yawning mouth leapt a rat.”

Trench Foot

• Soldiers stood for hours in wet, muddy conditions. They lived in this filth for months at a time.

• Trench foot was an infection of the feet caused by exposure to cold, wet, dirty conditions.

Trench Foot

• The feet would lose their feeling, then start to turn either blue or red.

Trench Foot• The infection would

literally eat away the skin and cause massive growths to form on the foot.

• If left untreated, the infection could become gangrenous and need to be amputated.

Trench Foot

• The only prevention was to keep your feet dry and change your socks 2 – 3 times a day. This was not always possible in the trenches.

• In addition, it was believed that if you covered your feet with grease, they would become more “water proof”. This actually did work to a degree.

Trench Foot

• Trench foot was such a big problem that the British army made the condition of the men’s feet the personal responsibility of the commanding officers.

• If a soldier was found to have trench foot, it was the commanding officer who faced a court martial.

Trench Foot

• The men were ordered to carry extra socks and to dry their feet regularly.

• They were also ordered each day to go by twos into an area to apply grease made from whale-oil to each others feet.

• A battalion at the front could go through 10 gallons of whale-oil grease every day.

• Sergeant Harry Roberts describes Trench foot like this: “Your feet swell to two or three times their normal size and go completely dead. You could stick a bayonet into them and not feel a thing. If you are fortunate enough not to lose your feet and the swelling begins to go down, it is then that the intolerable, indescribable agony begins. I have heard men cry and even scream with the pain and many had to have their feet and legs amputated.”