Learning Objectives

1. Learning Objectives • To understand what life was like for a British soldier on the Western Front.

2. DYSENTERY Dysentery is a disease involving the inflammation of the lining of the large intestines. The inflammation causes stomach pains and diarrhoea. Some cases involve vomiting and fever. The bacteria enters the body through the mouth in food or water, and also by human faeces and contact with infected people. The diarrhoea causes people suffering from dysentery to lose important salts and fluids from the body. This can be fatal if the body dehydrates. This disease struck the men in the trenches as there was no proper sanitation. Latrines in the trenches were pits four to five feet deep. When they were within one foot they were supposed to be filled in and the soldiers had the job of digging a new one. Sometimes there was not time for this and men used a nearby shell-hole. Dysentery caused by contaminated water was especially a problem in the early stages of the war. The main reason for this was that it was some time before regular supplies of water to the trenches could be organised. Soldiers were supplied with water bottles, that could be refilled when they returned to reserve lines. However, the water-bottle supply was rarely enough for their needs and soldiers in the trenches often depended on impure water collected from shell-holes or other cavities. Later, to purify it, chloride of lime was added to the water. This was not popular with the soldiers as they disliked the taste of the purified water.

3. TRENCH WATER In September, 1914, the German commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn ordered his men to dig trenches that would provide them with protection from the advancing French and British troops. As the Allies soon realised that they could not break through this line, they also began to dig trenches. As the Germans were the first to decide where to stand fast and dig, they had been able to choose the best places to build their trenches. The possession of the higher ground not only gave the Germans a tactical advantage, but it also forced the British to live in the worst conditions. Most of this area was rarely a few feet above sea level. As soon as soldiers began to dig down they would invariably find water two or three feet below the surface. Along the whole line, trench life involved a never-ending struggle against water and mud. Duck-boards were placed at the bottom of the trenches to protect soldiers from problems such as trench foot. Much of the land where the trenches were dug was either clay or sand. The water could not pass through the clay and because the sand was on top, the trenches became waterlogged when it rained. The trenches were hard to dig and kept on collapsing in the waterlogged sand. As well as trenches the shells from the guns and bombs made big craters in the ground. The rain filled up the craters and then poured into the trenches. Conditions got so bad that some men preferred to sleep outside their trenches. Arnold Ridley commented: "If you've ever tried to keep awake when you haven't had any sleep for days, it's not a question of allowing yourself to go to sleep. I can remember lying in a sunken road behind Gueudecourt. The trenches were full of water and I can remember getting out of the trench and lying on the parapet with the bullets flying around because sleep was such a necessity and death only meant sleep." Waterlogged trenches was a major problem at Passchendaele. In his autobiography, No Leading Lady (1968), Robert Sherriff recalled: "The great preliminary bombardment had begun. We were surrounded by batteries of artillery, and for three nights it was bedlam." This continued despite very heavy rain that turned the Ypres lowlands into a swamp. The situation was made worse by the fact that the British heavy bombardment had destroyed the drainage system in the area. As William Beach Thomas, a journalist working for the Daily Mail, pointed out: "Floods of rain and a blanket of mist have doused and cloaked the whole of the Flanders plain. The newest shell-holes, already half-filled with soakage, are now flooded to the brim. The rain has so fouled this low, stoneless ground, spoiled of all natural drainage by shell-fire, that we experienced the double value of the early work, for today moving heavy material was extremely difficult and the men could scarcely walk in full equipment, much less dig. Every man was soaked through and was standing or sleeping in a marsh. It was a work of energy to keep a rifle in a state fit to use." Robert Sherriff pointed out: The living conditions in our camp were sordid beyond belief. The cookhouse was flooded, and most of the food was uneatable. There was nothing but sodden biscuits and cold stew. The cooks tried to supply bacon for breakfast, but the men complained that it smelled like dead men." C. S. Lewis also had trouble from waterlogged trenches on the Western Front at Arras in 1917. "Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies... One walked in the trenches in thigh gumboots with water above the knee, and one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire."

4. RATS Many men killed in the trenches were buried almost where they fell. If a trench subsided, or new trenches or dugouts were needed, large numbers of decomposing bodies would be found just below the surface. These corpses, as well as the food scraps that littered the trenches, attracted rats. One pair of rats can produce 880 offspring in a year and so the trenches were soon swarming with them. Robert Graves remarked in his book, Goodbye to All That: "Rats came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welch. a new officer joined the company and, in token of welcome, was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned in that night he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand." George Coppard gave another reason why the rats were so large: "There was no proper system of waste disposal in trench life. Empty tins of all kinds were flung away over the top on both sides of the trench. Millions of tins were thus available for all the rats in France and Belgium in hundreds of miles of trenches. During brief moments of quiet at night, one could hear a continuous rattle of tins moving against each other. The rats were turning them over." Some of these rats grew extremely large. Harry Patch claimed that "there were rats as big as cats". Another soldier wrote: "The rats were huge. They were so big they would eat a wounded man if he couldn't defend himself." These rats became very bold and would attempt to take food from the pockets of sleeping men. Two or three rats would always be found on a dead body. They usually went for the eyes first and then they burrowed their way right into the corpse.

5. LICE Men in the trenches suffered from lice. One soldier writing after the war described them as "pale fawn in colour, and they left blotchy red bite marks all over the body." They also created a sour; stale smell. Various methods were used to remove the lice. A lighted candle was fairly effective but the skill of burning the lice without burning your clothes was only learnt with practice. George Coppard described how this worked: "The things lay in the seams of trousers, in the deep furrows of long thick woolly pants, and seemed impregnable in their deep entrenchments. A lighted candle applied where they were thickest made them pop like Chinese crackers. After a session of this, my face would be covered with small blood spots from extra big fellows which had popped too vigorously." In his autobiography, Harry Patch explains the problems he had with lice on the Western Front: "The lice were the size of grains of rice, each with its own bite, each with its own itch. When we could, we would run hot wax from a candle down the seams of our trousers, our vests - whatever you had - to burn the buggers out. It was the only thing to do. Eventually, when we got to Rouen, coming back, they took every stitch off us and gave us a suit of sterilised blue material. And the uniforms they took off, they burned them - to get rid of the lice." As well as causing frenzied scratching, lice also carried disease. This was known as pyrrexhia or trench fever. The first symptoms were shooting pains in the shins and was followed by a very high fever. Although the disease did not kill, it did stop soldiers from fighting and accounted for about 15% of all cases of sickness in the British Army.

6. SHELL SHOCK During the first two weeks of the Battle of Passchendaele the British, Australian and Canadian guns fired 4,283,550 shells at the German defences. It is estimated that throughout the First World War the Allies used 5,000,000 tons of artillery shells against enemy positions. The Central Powers used a similar amount of shells in their effort to win the war. Soldiers subjected to continual exposure to shell-fire were in danger of developing shell-shock. Early symptoms included tiredness, irritability, giddiness, lack of concentration and headaches. Eventually the men suffered mental breakdowns making it impossible for them to remain in the front-line. Between 1914 and 1918 the British Army identified 80,000 men (2% of those who saw active service) as suffering from shell-shock. A much larger number of soldiers with these symptoms were classified as 'malingerers' and sent back to the front-line. In some cases men committed suicide. Others broke down under the pressure and refused to obey the orders of their officers. Some responded to the pressures of shell-shock by deserting. Sometimes soldiers who disobeyed orders got shot on the spot. In some cases, soldiers were court-martialled. Official figures said that 304 British soldiers were court-martialled and executed. A common punishment for disobeying orders was Field Punishment Number One. This involved the offender being attached to a fixed object for up to two hours a day and for a period up to three months. These men were often put in a place within range of enemy shell-fire.

7. BLIGHTY WOUNDS Faced with the prospect of being killed or permanently disabled, soldiers sometimes hoped that they would receive what was known as a blighty wound, and be sent back home. There were some cases where soldiers shot themselves in an attempt to end their time on the frontline. Self-inflicted wounds (SIW) was a capital offence and if discovered, a man found guilty of this faced execution by firing-squad. A total of 3,894 men in the British Army were convicted of SIW. None of these men were executed but they all served periods in prison. Guy Chapman wrote about a man in his battalion called Turnbull who had been charged with SIW: "A bullet fired deliberately at the foot was the only way out. Perhaps those who call this man a coward will consider the desperation to which he was driven, to place his rifle against the foot, and drive through the bones and flesh the smashing metal. Let me hope that the court-martial's sentence was light. Not that it matters, for, in truth, the real, the real sentence had been inflicted long ago." Others killed themselves rather than carry on in the trenches. The usual method of suicide was to place the muzzle of their Lee-Enfield rifle against the head and press the trigger with their bare big toe. In some cases, when men could endure no more, stood up on the fire-step and allowed themselves to be shot by an enemy sniper.

8. LETTERS Twelve and a half million letters were sent to the the Western Front every week. In 1914 the Postal Section of the Royal Engineers had a staff of 250 men. By 1918 the Army Postal Service employed 4,000 soldiers. Letters only took two or three days to arrive from Britain. Even soldiers in the front line trenches received daily deliveries of letters. Soldiers were also encouraged to write letters to friends and family in Britain. Most men decided it would be better to conceal the horrors of the trench warfare. As a result of the Defence of the Realm Act that was passed in 1914, all letters that the men wrote should have been read and censored by junior officers. Some officers could not bring themselves to read their men's letters and these arrived in Britain unaltered. For example, Lieutenant John Reith later admitted in his autobiography, Wearing Spurs (1966): "I did my best to take an interest in the members of my platoon personally. In manual exercises and in extended order drill in a field I could take none; and they knew it. I was supposed to censor their letters home, but I informed them that they were on their honour not to say things they should not say, and I handed over the censor's stamp to the sergeant."

9. CASUALTIES IN THE TRENCHES The precise number of people killed during the First World War is difficult to measure. Estimates vary from 8.5 to 12.0 million but with the collapse of government bureaucracies in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey accurate measurement becomes impossible. Another problem involves the way death was defined. Most governments only published figures for men who were killed during military action. Soldiers who died slowly from their wounds, gas poisoning or disease, did not always appear in the statistics published after the war. Most soldiers were killed during major offensives. Over 21,300 were killed on the first day of the Somme and over 50 per sent of those who took part in the attack were wounded. Other major offences such as those at Loos and Passchendaele resulted in large numbers being killed. Being in front-line trenches was also extremely dangerous. Almost every day some enemy artillery shells would fall on the trenches. One study suggested that one-third of all casualties on the Western Front were killed or wounded while in the trenches.

10. EXECUTIONS When the British Army went into action in the summer of 1914, a number of offences were punishable with death. This included mutiny, cowardice before the enemy, self-inflicted wounds, disobedience of a lawful order, desertion or attempted desertion, sleeping or being drunk on post, striking a superior officer, casting away arms or ammunition in the presence of the enemy, leaving a post without orders, abandoning a position, and treacherously communicated with or in any way assisting the enemy. Brigadier-General Frank Percy Crozier admitted he ordered the shooting of sentries who fell asleep while on duty. He also described the execution of Private James Crozier of the Royal Irish Rifles: "There are hooks on the post; we always do things thoroughly in the Rifles. He is hooked on like dead meat in a butcher's shop. His eyes are bandaged - not that it really matters, for he is already blind... A volley rings out - a nervous volley it is true, yet a volley. Before the fatal shots are fired I had called the battalion to attention. There is a pause, I wait. I see the medical officer examining the victim. He makes a sign, the subaltern strides forward, a single shot rings out. Life is now extinct... We march back to breakfast while the men of a certain company pay the last tribute at the graveside of an unfortunate comrade. This is war." Victor Silvester was a member of one firing-squad in 1916: "The tears were rolling down my cheeks as he went on attempting to free himself from the ropes attaching him to the chair. I aimed blindly and when the gunsmoke had cleared away we were further horrified to see that, although wounded, the intended victim was still alive. Still blindfolded, he was attempting to make a run for it still strapped to the chair. The blood was running freely from a chest wound. An officer in charge stepped forward to put the finishing touch with a revolver held to the poor man's temple. He had only once cried out and that was when he shouted the one word mother. He could not have been much older than me. We were told later that he had in fact been suffering from shell-shock, a condition not recognised by the army at the time. Later I took part in four more such executions." At total of 304 men were executed during the First World War, while another 18 suffered the same fate while waiting to leave the army after the signing of the Armistice. Of those executed, the vast majority, 286, committed the offence while in the trenches on the Western Front.

11. HORSES AND MULES At the beginning of the war the British Army owned 25,000 horses. This was not considered enough and during the next two weeks a further 165,000 were recruited from Britain. Horses were also purchased from the USA, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Spain and Portugal. Horses aged three to twelve were trained as rapidly as possible by British soldiers called 'roughriders'. When they were ready the horses were formed into squadrons and sent to the Western Front. The best horses were used by the cavalry. These horses had to be strong as the average cavalryman's weight was twelve stone and his equipment, saddle, ammunition, etc. usually weighed another nine stone. Men in the cavalry were instructed to take the weight off their horses as much as they could. This including dismounting and walking with their horses and unsaddling at every opportunity. In 1914 the British Army only owned eighty motor vehicles. Therefore they were very dependent on horses for transporting goods and supplies. This was especially true of the Western Front where conditions made it very difficult to use motor vehicles. The British Army also purchased a large number of mules from the USA. The mule has amazing stamina and endured the terrible conditions in the front-line better than the horse. At the end of the war the army owned 213,300 mules. Finding enough food for the horses and mules at the Western Front was a constant problem. The daily ration for a horse was 20 lbs of grain a day. This was nearly 25% below what a horse would be fed in Britain. The horses were always hungry and where often seen trying to eat wagon wheels. When grain was in short supply, the army fed their horses and mules on sawdust cake. By 1917 the British Army were employing over 530,000 horses and 230,000 mules. Large numbers of horses were killed and wounded during the war. Others became lame or sick. The British Army discovered they needed to buy about 15,000 horses a month to maintain the number they needed. It has been calculated that almost half a million horses owned by the British Army were killed during the First World War.

12. RECONNAISANCE PATROLS Small patrols of men were often sent into No Man's Land to discover information about the enemy. All men had to take turns in this very dangerous work. The patrols usually went out at night. They would cautiously inch their way forward on their stomachs and try to get within earshot of the enemy trenches. The commanders also organised raiding parties. A typical raiding party would comprise 30 men. It was standard procedure for everyone to blacken their faces with grease-paint or burnt cork. The men carried cut down rifles, coshes, sheath-knives and grenades. One of the main objectives of these raids was to capture German soldiers for interrogation. REGULATION EQUIPMENT When a British Army soldier was ordered to attack the enemy on the Western Front he carried a total of 30 kilograms (66 lbs) of equipment. This included a rifle, two mills grenades, 220 rounds of ammunition, a steel helmet, wire cutters, field dressing, entrenching tool, greatcoat, two sandbags, rolled ground sheet, water bottle, haversack, mess tin, towel, shaving kit, extra socks, message book and preserved food rations. The weight of the equipment made it difficult to move very fast across No Man's Land.

13. STRETCHER BEARERS In good conditions two men could carry a wounded man on a stretcher. However, after heavy rain it took four men to lift a stretcher. As Harold Chapin pointed out in a letter to Alice Chapin in May 1915: "It took six of us to carry one man. You have no idea of the physical fatigue entailed in carrying a twelve stone man a thousand yards across muddy fields." The stretcher bearers not only had the problem of dragging their feet out of the mud after every step, they also had to make sure not to rock the stretcher as this would increase the pain of the wounded man. The pain of shattered bone ends grating together was so intense that the wounded man was likely to die of shock. One stretcher-bearer working in the mud in 1916 reported that: "as one carried a wounded man you got stuck in the mud and staggered. You put out a hand to steady yourself, the earth gave way and you found you were clutching the blackened face of a half-buried, dead soldier." Captain Charles Hudson of the 11th Sherwood Foresters, later argued: "Stretcher-bearers were wonderful people. Ours had been the bandsmen of earlier training days. They were always called to the most dangerous places, where casualties had already taken place, yet there were always men ready to volunteer for the job, at any rate in the early days of the war. The men were not bloodthirsty. Stretcher-bearers were unarmed and though they were not required to do manual labour or sentry-go, this I am sure was not the over-riding reason for their readiness to volunteer." Once he had been picked up by the stretcher-bearers, the wounded man would be taken to the regimental aid post that was usually based in the reserve trenches. After the wounds had been cleaned and bandaged the injured man was taken to the Casualty Clearing Station where surgery was carried out.

14. GERMAN ATROCITIES? During the First World War most countries publicized stories of enemy soldiers committing atrocities. It was believed that it would help persuade young men to join the armed forces. As one British general pointed out after the war: "to make armies go on killing one another it is necessary to invent lies about the enemy". These atrocity stories were then fed to newspapers who were quite willing to publish them. British newspapers accused German soldiers of a series of crimes including: gouging out the eyes of civilians, cutting off the hands of teenage boys, raping and sexually mutilating women, giving children hand grenades to play with, bayoneting babies and the crucifixion of captured soldiers. Wythe Williams, who worked for the New York Times, investigated some of these stories and reported "that none of the rumours of wanton killings and torture could be verified.“ In December 1914 Herbert Asquith appointed a committee of lawyers and historians under the chairmanship of Lord Bryce to investigate alleged German atrocities in Belgium. The report, published in 30 different languages, claimed that there had been numerous examples of German brutality towards non-combatants, especially towards old men, women and children. Five days after the Bryce Report was issued, the German authorities published its White Book. This included accounts of atrocities committed by Belgians on German soldiers. Although soldiers from all countries were guilty of individual brutalities, research after the war suggested that these were isolated incidents rather than any systematic attempt to terrorize and punish the enemy. However, others have suggested it was fairly common to kill prisoners of war. Robert Graves pointed out in Goodbye to All That (1929): "For true atrocities, meaning personal rather than military violations of the code of war, few opportunities occurred - except in the interval between the surrender of prisoners and their arrival (or non-arrival) at headquarters. Advantage was only too often taken of this opportunity. Nearly every instructor in the mess could quote specific instances of prisoners having been murdered on the way back. The commonest motives were, it seems, revenge for the death of friends or relatives, jealousy of the prisoner's trip to a comfortable prison camp in England, military enthusiasm, fear of being suddenly overpowered by the prisoners, or, more simply, impatience with the escorting job."

15. BOY SOLDIERS The British Army only had 750,000 men in August 1914. The war minister, Field-Marshall Lord Kitchener, decided Britain would need another 500,000 men to help defeat Germany. A combination of well-designed posters and passionate recruitment speeches encouraged thousands of men to join the armed forces. By the end of August over 300,000 men had answered the call at army recruitment centres. Many of those who had signed up were younger than the official minimum age of nineteen. The recruitment campaign was meant to encourage adults to sign up for the armed forces. Unfortunately, some younger citizens saw the posters and thought that it would be fun to be in the army. Others saw the army as an opportunity to travel or to get away from strict parents. George Coppard has admitted: "Although I seldom saw a newspaper, I knew about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo. News placards screamed out at every street corner, and military bands blared out their martial music in the main streets of Croydon. This was too much for me to resist, and as if drawn by a magnate, I knew I had to enlist straight away." James Lovegrove was only sixteen but he came under pressure from members of the Order of the White Feather to join the armed forces: "On my way to work one morning a group of women surrounded me. They started shouting and yelling at me, calling me all sorts of names for not being a soldier! Do you know what they did? They struck a white feather in my coat, meaning I was a coward. Oh, I did feel dreadful, so ashamed." Although he was under-age he decided to join the British Army. Hundreds of boys falsified birth dates to meet the minimum age requirements. Desperate for soldiers, recruiting officers did not always check the boy's details very carefully. A sixteen year-old later told of how he was able to join the army: "The recruiting sergeant asked me my age and when I told him he said, 'You had better go out, come in again, and tell me different.' I came back, told him I was nineteen and I was in." Private E. Lugg was able to join the 13th Royal Sussex Regiment at the age of thirteen. However, he was not the youngest soldier in the British Army, Private Lewis served at the Somme when he was only twelve. George Maher, who was only 13 at the time, claims that Lewis was too short to see over the edge of the trench."The youngest was 12 years old. A little nuggety bloke he was, too. We joked that the other soldiers would have had to have lifted him up to see over the trenches." Maher was eventually arrested: "I was locked up on a train under guard, one of five under-age boys caught serving on the front being sent back to England."

16. SNIPERS Soldiers in front-line trenches suffered from enemy snipers. These men were usually specially trained marksmen that had rifles with telescopic sights. German snipers did not normally work from their own trenches. The main strategy was to creep out at dawn into no-man's land and remain there all day. Wearing camouflaged clothing and using the cover of a fake tree, they waited for a British soldier to pop his head above the parapet. A common trick was to send up a kite with English writing on it. Anyone who raised his head to read it was shot. MINES On the Western Front during the First World War, the military employed specialist miners to dig tunnels under No Man's Land. The main objective was to place mines beneath enemy defensive positions. When it was detonated, the explosion would destroy that section of the trench. The infantry would then advance towards the enemy front-line hoping to take advantage of the confusion that followed the explosion of an underground mine. Soldiers in the trenches developed different strategies to discover enemy tunnelling. One method was to drive a stick into the ground and hold the other end between the teeth and feel any underground vibrations. Another one involved sinking a water-filled oil drum into the floor of the trench. The soldiers then took it in turns to lower an ear into the water to listen for any noise being made by tunnellers. It could take as long as a year to dig a tunnel and place a mine. As well as digging their own tunnels, the miners had to listen out for enemy tunnellers. On occasions miners accidentally dug into the opposing side's tunnel and an underground fight took place. When an enemy's tunnel was found it was usually destroyed by placing an explosive charge inside. Mines became larger and larger. At the beginning of the Somme offensive, the British denoted two mines that contained 24 tons of explosives. Another 91,111 lb. mine at Spanbroekmolen created a hole that afterwards measured 430 ft. from rim to rim. Now known as the Pool of Peace, it is large enough to house a 40 ft. deep lake. In January, 1917, General Sir Herbert Plumer, gave orders for 20 mines to be placed under German lines at Messines. Over the next five months more than 8,000 metres of tunnel were dug and 600 tons of explosive were placed in position. Simultaneous explosion of the mines took place at 3.10 on 7th June. The blast killed an estimated 10,000 soldiers and was so loud it was heard in London.

17. INFANTRY TACTICS At the beginning of the 20th century most military commanders placed a great deal of emphasis on using the infantry for massed bayonet charges supported by the cavalry and mobile field artillery. Leaders of the French Army were particularly keen on this approach and favoured sending its infantry into action without equipment for entrenchment. Their commanders argued that defensive precautions were unnecessary as repeated waves of massed assault, delivered with sufficient speed and aggression, could not fail. Infantry tactics had to be reassessed after armies suffered heavy casualties during attacks against machine-guns. The French infantry were forced to retreat during the invasion of Lorraine and the Germans experienced heavy losses when storming the fortress at Liege during August 1914. Despite the support of Preliminary Bombardment, Chlorine Gas and Flame-Throwers, the infantry failed to achieve a breakthrough on the Western Front during 1915. The following year, new tactics such as Creeping Barrage and tank attacks, also failed to breakdown entrenched defences. The same was also true of the infiltration tactics tried by the Germans in 1917. It was only at Amiens in 1918, when Colonel John Fuller managed to persuade General Henry Rawlinson to use 412 tanks followed by soldiers and supported by over 1,000 combat aircraft that the Allies managed to breakthrough the German frontline on the Western Front.