Here is a man waiting to fire from the "firing step"

At the bottom of the trench, "duck-boards" were placed along to help people walk along it. As there was a lot of mud, it helped the people from sinking into it. The walls of the trench as you would imagine, couldn't just be left as a mud wall, so they were reinforced as well with railway sleepers, corrugated iron or sometimes by specially made sections of woven basket. This was absolutely useless when the trench came under heavy shell fire but did help the soil dropping into the trench.

As you would expect, the soldiers had to go to the toilet some time or another. Latrines, as they were called, were situated at intervals along the trench. They shouldn't really get the privilege of being called a latrine because it was only a hole cut into the back of the trench. These latrines had to be moved quite often though because enemy snipers knew where the latrines were and were always on the lookout for careless people doing their necessaries.

Another good idea that the trenches had were that they had a gas alarm (Gas Point) every one hundred metres or so along the front line. It was just an empty brass cartridge case from an artillery shell with a piece of rope hanging from it. This wasn't much but it did the job. If a poison gas shell was fired, then the sentry would sound the alarm and the men would immediately put on their gas masks.

Between the two sets of trenches, there was a large bit of land called "No Man's Land". This was the only thing that came between the two armies. No Man's Land was sometimes up to a kilometre wide in some places but less than thirty metres wide in other bits. Not a lot was in the middle except a few bodies of soldiers that had been ordered out of the trenches to invade the enemy's trenches. Also lay here were unexploded bomb shells, rusted rifles as well as the disgusting little rodent rats that lived on the decaying bodies.

In front of the trenches, barbed wire also protected the trenches. This was to stop enemy soldiers from invading. The barbed wire was sometimes as thick as fifteen metres in some places. As the war went on though, the thicker the wire got. I wouldn't like to go through this because the barbs were known to be as thick as a man's thumb. Barbed wire was also used along the trench to sort of section it off. This was so if trench was captured by enemy then they wouldn't be able to catch the whole trench as easy as they thought.

Soldiers had to sleep somewhere and that somewhere were the dug outs. These were just holes in the side of the trench so they were out of the way of passing people. The roof of the dugouts were sometimes supported by wood or sandbags. The men slept on top of each other in bunks.

Some of the soldiers taking a well earned rest in their dugout.

Officers had a bit more classy dug outs though. These were dug under ground and the conditions were ten times better than those of the normal soldiers.

As you may have figured out, the trenches were very complex inventions sometimes. I think that the amount of people that got killed in the trenches did conrtibute greatly to the mass number of killings during World War One.