What was it Like? - In the Trenches of World War I.

When I think about history, I always wanted to put myself in the shoes of the people that lived in these situations that I was reading about. What it must of been like to cross the treacherous Ocean on a boat for months without knowing where you were going or to be a slave traveling like a caged up animal in chains, surrounding by sickness and stench. How a soldier must of felt when they were lined up to charge into ongoing gunfire from across the field or taken a little further back swinging swords or axes and dodging arrows. Well one situation that I would like to look at in, What was it Like?, that really interested me was the trench warfare from World War I. Set to be the "War to end All War", World War I had its share of new weaponry teamed up with old school (Napoleonic War Era) war strategy, which led to a slaughterhouse of young men that were in search of an adventure they never expected to be so dreadful and deadly.

The construction of trenches is as old as the existence of war. However, the scale of trench warfare during World War I was unlike anything ever seen on earth and it was a war of attrition that stayed in a constant stalemate. Truly a World War, there were battles being fought in Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, Asia; but smack dab in the middle of Europe laid these trenches that served as a suicide mechanism. What is Trench Warfare? Trench Warfare is a warfare in which both combatants have trenches that are fortified and the lines are constantly moving back and forth in a defensive-oriented fashion. One big problem with the trench warfare that was happening during WW I, was that the generals were slaughtering their own soldiers by refusing to change their war strategy. The old school Napoleonic Era columnar tactic in which the soldiers march in a column toward the enemy line as opposed to a open order skirmish led to millions of unnecessary deaths in the first few years of the war.

Now lets get back to what life was like in the trenches for soldiers. First thing we need to understand about life in the trenches was what kind of weapons were being used during WW I. There were several new weapons being used in the Great War and also improvements on older weapons. Infantry carried with them in the trenches rifles with bayonets, shotguns, and grenades. Machine guns were used for the first time in battalions and there were the light machine guns that individual soldiers carried and heavy machine guns, which needed 8 people to use and maneuver and that served as a fixed attack on the enemy line. Soldiers were constantly killed or injured by incoming mortars and artillery. Fragmentation from these bombings often injured, buried or killed soldiers that were in fixed trenches. Many different gases were used until both sides found that mustard gas was not as easy to detect in the air as the others. New weapons were being used as well like the flamethrower and the first uses of tanks and planes in war, but these weapons were used sparingly and planes were mostly for reconnaissance and artillery spotting. Barbed wire became a horrendous obstacle that served as a buffer for enemy lines. New improvements in helmets helped soldiers that in the beginning of the war were using leather helmets. These new weapons and improvements on weapons are what led to such a grueling stalemate of a war, because there were really no advances on each side as a result of not being able to break the lines and hold them.

What must life have been like in the trenches? Soldiers were constantly exposed to artillery, snipers and machine guns in the trenches. Besides the enemy, the soldiers had to fight against diseases from lice, rats the size of cats (which would feed off the dead bodies laying around), the cold weather which could lead to Trench Fever and the muddy water in trenches that sometimes reached their knees and could cause Trench Foot (Led to many soldiers having their feet amputated). The psychological and physical effects of war can be very heavy on these soldiers who were sometimes sleeping next to dead bodies that they couldn't find the time to bury. Soldiers did not have a lot of leave time either and were in the front lines for long periods of time and even behind the front lines they were still likely to be hit by artillery or shrapnel. One thing that had to get to the soldiers was the smell that filled the air from the dead bodies that were either laying around or buried in shallow graves nearby. It is easy to see that life in the trenches during World War I was a very extreme experience that left all soldiers psychologically scarred and many physically injured. Entire generations of youth lost their lives in a war that accomplished nothing but death and destruction and as a result of bad war strategies, many unnecessary deaths happened.