World War I
Life in the Trenches
The world had never seen – and doubtless will never see again –
trenches like those on the Western Front. There were front-line
trenches, communications trenches, reserve trenches- hundreds
of miles of them, many bearing the names on hometown streets. Over & over they were built,
demolished, & rebuilt. Thousands of men died in one charge after another for possession of a few feet
of them. As a poet of the time put it:
Five hundred miles of Germans,
Five hundred miles of French
& Englishmen, Scotch & Irish men
All fighting for the trench;
& when the trench is taken,
& many thousands slain,
The losers, with more slaughter,
Retake the trench again.
Soldiers slept in holes dug into the trench walls or on cots squeezed into small dugouts. Rats
were a constant problem, & the men amused themselves by taking potshots at them as they crawled up
the wooden supports. One officer told of hearing a
scuffling sound on his bed one night; when he turned on his
flashlight he found two rats on his blankets tussling for
possession of a severed hand.
The rat story circulated among the soldiers as a good
joke, for the men quickly grew accustomed to the casual
presence of dead flesh, whether animal or human. In a
British trench a dried-up hand of a German or Frenchman,
which had been left jutting out from the wall, was shaken
by the men when they went out to fight, for good luck.
The rats were there because of so much dead flesh
lying about. Sometimes the trenches were piled high with
dead bodies & the stench from them became intolerable. Sometimes soldiers risked their own lives by
going into “no man’s land,” wearing gas masks because of
the stench, to bury the enemy’s dead. For the rest of the day
everything they ate, drank, or touched smelled or rotted flesh.
Making matters worse was the fact that the winter of
1917-1918 was the coldest France had suffered in years, &
flu made great inroads among the troops. Some of the
American doughboys were not always well supplied with
proper clothes, especially shoes. What footwear they had
was not always durable enough – the boys called them “tango
shoes” & “hen’s skins.” General Billy Mitchell, head of the
U.S. Air Service, said he saw “a division go by the other day
with the men practically barefooted, many leaving blood
marks in the snow.”
The Soldier: An Endangered Species
To lessen the casualties from close-in fighting, each side unmercifully pounded the other’s
trenches with long-range artillery. When a charge was coming up, the bombardment would first be
aimed high to reach the enemy’s artillery, then dropped down to destroy his trenches. Even
uncontested sectors were bombarded steadily, just to be sure; the British called this “normal wastage.”
Soldiers learned which whine threatened them & which one didn’t. They even learned to sleep during a
bombardment, just as they learned to doze while working. A soldier filling a sandbag might look up to
find the buddy holding it fast asleep.
The new machine guns killed the enemy faster than
twenty men could. The machine-gunner, therefore, became
an endangered species because the enemy was always after
his hide most of all. A machine-gunner’s life expectancy was
said to be about thirty minutes.
The machine-gunner learned to live with such a grim
statistic, & his outlook often became detached, even amused.
For fun he would take cartridges out of the gunbelt at the
proper intervals to make his gun rat-a-tat out some familiar
tune, such as “shave-and-a-haircut, six bits.” Those with
water-cooled guns sprayed enemy lines indiscriminately to
heat the water in them for tea or soup.
Going “Over the Top”
When American finally entered the war in 1917, the Army tried to get its men to the front as
fast as possible. As a result, some doughboys arrived in the trenches with very little training; indeed,
some learned to load their rifles at the front. These unfortunate soldiers were like the one in a popular
song who said:
Goodbye, Maw! Goodbye, Paw!
Goodbye, mule, with yer old heehaw!
I may not know what this war’s about,
But you bet, by gosh, I’ll soon find out!
And find out the young man did – the first time he had to go “over the top” into no man’s land.
The attack would begin just before dawn, after the artillery finished its softening-up barrage. Loaded
down with a rifle & perhaps a pistol, cartridge belt, canteen, trench knife, first-aid kit, and - if the
weather was cold – an overcoat, he began his
hellish run of 500 yards or so to the enemy’s
lines.
His first problem was the barbed wire,
which might consist of as many as ten aprons of
wire with barbs as thick as the thumb. (Soldiers
joked that the war would last a hundred years:
five for fighting, then ninety-five of winding up
the barbed wire.) He cut his way through this, or
stepped over it on the back of a dead comrade.
Dodging shell holes – some of them big enough to
put a house in – he jumped into the enemy’s
trench & took it, was killed, or was driven back
by a counterattack.
In a passage revealing how war can blind a soldier to the humanity of his enemy – & even
create a craving to kill – one doughboy wrote of his assault:
Oh, it was a dandy barrage & we walked over behind it & took our objective without much
opposition. I threw my grenades at a couple of Huns in a bay & when they exploded (both Huns &
grenades) I slid into a trench &, according to plan, rebuilt the firing step. I prepared myself in case of
counter-attack. I did not get a chance to use my lovely bayonet.