Even one’s own trench wasn’t safe.  Snipers would pick off a tall man who showed his head above the top of his trench for just a few seconds.  Even short men could be shot if they were sitting on a latrine. Just sitting in a trench in these conditions, hearing far off gunfire was too much for some men.

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye.

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home at pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

Siegfried Sassoon

If you think you could have coped with this, then picture yourself as one of the soldiers below, about to go ‘over the top’ without the aid of tanks, as most soldiers had to.

With a background of deafening noise, shells bombarding the enemy and mines exploding near to you, you would have been crouched down in your trench gripping your rifle and fixing a bayonet on the end of it.  You knew that you had a 1 in 5 chance of being killed and would probably be injured or captured.  You would be walking straight into machine gun fire and should you reach the enemy front line trench, you had to negotiate metres of barbed wire, which had barbs as big as your thumb.

All this highlights the stupidity of fighting a war of attrition, men were certain to die, without really achieving much in the way of gaining ground.  However an ordinary soldier couldn’t dispute his orders, if he tried to desert he would be sentenced to death for cowardice or forced to fight anyway.  With such prospects filling a soldier’s mind, it isn’t surprising that many men were sick or wet themselves prior to going ‘over the top’.  Even if a man survived his first attack, he had to fight again and again.  This shattered men’s nerves and having to endure an artillery bombardment yourself was the last straw for many soldiers.  Remember the British didn’t have as many underground bunkers as the Germans did, so some men had to sit in their dugouts, during heavy shelling.  The constant noise and smoke, combined with the knowledge that you were the target of those bombs, turned hardened soldiers into nervous wrecks.  The condition caused by these traumatic experiences was known as shell shock and was the longest lasting effect of WWI.  Soldiers suffering from it would foam uncontrollably at the mouth and wet themselves continually.  Men who were shell shocked seemed to forget where they were and would wander aimlessly, an easy target for snipers.  Even many years after the war, a victim of shell shock might still be incontinent, cry out suddenly for no apparent reason or suffer fits at any loud noise.  One harrowing account describes how a big strong man was running up to bowl at cricket.  Suddenly a nearby car started up with a loud bang, the bowler fell to the ground instantly and started foaming at the mouth, unable to help himself.

As you can see a soldier from WWI, would find it very hard to lead a normal life and in particular have an everyday job after the war.  Even if uninjured, the war had made it’s mark upon every soldier.  Life would never be the same for the men of that generation and they could only hope for one thing... that there would never be a war on that scale again.  Unfortunately their hopes weren’t to be realised.  Twenty one years later in 1939, World War Two was declared and over the next six years more than 50 million people would die before peace was secured.

Today we can only pray that there will never be a World War Three and remember the soldiers who fought so bravely that we might live in peace.  I feel that we cannot praise enough the sacrifice of the millions of men and women who fought and died in WWI.  Let us never forget them.

Daniel Hine 3Kb

Books

In Time of War edited by Anne Harvey

Booklets

S3 History - Trench Warfare Investigation

Websites

www.harris-academy.com

www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/