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Trench Warfare and WWI. Location of the Trenches:.
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Location of the Trenches: The main fighting during the First World War occurred in the trenches. There were two main areas the trenches were built: from the Belgium coast of the British channel, right up to Switzerland, that became known as 'the Western Front' and the Eastern Front between Austria-Hungary and Russia.
Purpose of Trenches: The main job of the trenches were to provide defense.
Life in the Trenches: When inside a trench, a soldier was perfectly safe from any of the advancing enemies fire, and because of guard and barbed wire defending the zigzag rows of trenches, the enemy could not get through to attack - they would be killed before they even got close.
Structure of the Trenches: Most of the Allied trenches were built only a few feet above sea level, meaning as they dug down into the ground, they quickly found water.
Trench Foot: Because of the constant soaking in water during the early part of the war, soldiers were finding themselves with all kinds of problems,. One disease that the water was causing was Trench Foot. Trench Foot was a painful foot condition that would cause the soldier to lose sensation in his feet, the foot tissue to be damaged and in bad cases the foot would have gangrene. In severe cases where the blood stopped circulating through the feet, and the feet turned gangrene, they would have to be amputated to stop the disease spreading.
Other Problems: During the night, the soldiers would have to endure not only the biting of the cold, but also the biting leaching of the lice. They would wake covered in red sores where the lice had taken their fill of blood, scratching terribly. They tried many methods to try to deal with lice, but none worked well enough to give the soldiers any comfort.
Lice: They rarely had a chance to get washed or have a bath. There was also very little way to stop infestation that men had to suffer with, and had no way to prevent it. The lice problem was terrible--they would get into the men's clothing and once there , there was little that could be done about them - about 97% of soldiers were infested.
Besides the lice and the disease they brought with them, there was also the problem of rats, where the lice originated from. A nasty shock for any soldier was when they were trying to get to sleep and a rat suddenly came scampering over them. The Rats…
Rats… Attracted by the many decomposing bodies, and scraps of food that littered the trenches, rats were soon swarming through. They would steal the food from sleeping men's pockets, and could always be found around a dead body. They could also grow extremely large, as food was plentiful -- 'as large as cats' to quote one soldier.
British soldier describing night in the trenches in 1916 • “Lights out. Now the rats and the lice are the masters of the house. You can hear the rats nibbling, running, jumping, rushing from plank to plank, emitting their little squeals behind the dugout’s corrugated metal. It’s a noisy swarming activity that just won’t stop. At any moment I expect one to land on my nose. And then it’s the lice and fleas that begin to devour me. Absolutely impossible to get any shut-eye. Toward midnight I begin to doze off. A terrible racket makes me jump. Artillery fire, the crackling of rifle and machine-gun fire. I doze off so as to get up at six. The rats and the lice get up, too; waking to life is also waking to misery.”
