by Barrie Pitt
The episode was thus concluded, cavalrymen believing that their traditional position on the pinnacle of the military hierarchy was unchallenged, the tank men angry but obstinately certain of the ultimate justification of their ideas. The infantrymen consoled their dashed hopes of an end to their appalling tribulations with their customary mordant cynicism, and life in the line continued as before.
It was not a pleasant life for either side, for it was characterized by mud, the stench of decomposition, and feelings of almost unbearable strain and futility – strain as a result of the conditions, futility as a result of the utter lack of success which had attended all efforts on both sides to break the appalling deadlock on the front. It had existed now for three whole years, blocking the progress of nations, robbing their populations of happiness, and ending so many lives in futile and inconsequential agony – for delusive hope had tantalized ten million men with dreams of breaking it, and in so doing had led them forward to a million deaths.
From the Belgian coast near Nieuport, the trench lines and the strips of ground between and behind them which war had wasted, lay smeared across the land like the trail of a gigantic snail. It left the sand-dunes of the coast in a fifteen-mile southerly curve, then bulged out eastwards and back again like the outline of a chancre around the murdered landscape of the Ypres Salient. Then from Messines to just east of Rheims it wobbled in an uncertain curve of small salients and re-entrants, making an overall bulge to the south-westward, after which it ran due east for nearly sixty miles to the Verdun fortress complex which anchored it firmly.
Then came the St. Mihiel salient – two thirty-mile long sides of an equilateral triangle which jutted into France – after which the line curved gently and comparatively evenly south-eastwards, until it rounded the northern end of the Vosges to run south along their eastern flank. Opposite Mulhouse it commenced its final stretch – southwards across the Belfort gap, to end just in front of the little village of Beurnevesin on the Swiss frontier.
The strip was sealed at its northern end by the sea – augmented by a murderous tangle of underwater wire, booby traps and contact mines sown by both sides – and at its southern end by the Swiss frontier, jealously guarded by troops of that naturally apprehensive neutral. Between these points the web of trenches ran in a swathe of danger and discomfort – across rivers which flooded them for months on end, across main pavé roads whose surfaces had long been blown to granite chips or ground to powder, across minor roads which had been completely obliterated. Villages had stood on the line when it had first been formed – they had sometimes been the anchorage points upon which company or battalion flanks had rested: now their remains were perhaps a collection of shattered, roofless buildings, deserted by their owners, inhabited only by transient poilus ‘resting’ in a quiet part of the line, while in sectors held by the British the villages had gone completely, only a crude placard reading ‘Site of Pozières’, ‘Site of St. Julien’, ‘Site of La Boiselle’, reminding passers-by of their erstwhile existence. From the air, pilots or balloonists would sometimes observe a pinker tinge in the ground where brick rubble had filled the craters and stained the mud.
The French right wing – along the flank of the Vosges – was a discontinuous line of forts and outposts, but along the rest of the line it was, in theory, possible to walk below ground from Nieuport to Verdun. (It would have taken at least two months, and enormous determination.) In practice such a journey could never have been made through the Allied trenches and is of doubtful possibility through those of the Central Powers. So far as the British were concerned, although parts of the line had been very strongly fortified with deep trenches and cavernous dug-outs, such practice was in general discouraged by the Staff, who recognized the difficulties of waging offensive warfare once the men who had to carry it out had been allowed to provide themselves with any degree of comfort or protection. This, of course, did not prevent them on their infrequent visits to the line from complaining angrily about the untidy and generally inadequate state of the trenches, the men’s uniforms, and the general attitude of thinly-veiled contempt with which they felt themselves, correctly, to be regarded.
The French attitude to fortification was similar, coloured by the fact that the trenches were in their own soil and a considerable area of their country was occupied by the hated Boche: the sooner the foe was evicted the better – and by 1918, the great majority of the vaunted French Army were unconcerned as to whether this desired end was obtained by a treaty of victory or one of defeat. They had realized that even victory can be bought at too high a price and were beginning to suspect that they had already paid it – so it was illogical to waste time and effort forming anything but the flimsiest and most temporary defences. It was also hard work, and would raise suspicions in the Boche mind that offensive activity was contemplated. This would bring retaliation and more French blood would be spilt. No – let the trenches be deep enough for the men to shelter in them as necessary, and if the Americans when they took them over wanted something better, then they could dig them themselves.
So if the British trenches were in places shallow and unsafe, the French trenches were in places virtually non-existent.
But the most serious obstructions to an undercover pilgrimage from the sea to Switzerland would be provided by nature. There were long periods when large portions of the line were flooded, and indeed the majority of the British line had been dug in country where it was estimated that the water-table was only a matter of two or three feet below the surface. Nevertheless, Field Regulations and Staff Orders demanded trenches seven feet deep, and by such devices as high sandbag parapets and quite extensive projects of civil engineering coupled with continual pumping operations, there were even times when the trenches were habitable.
But when bombardment destroyed the intricate drainage system, or heavy rainfall overburdened it, the trenches flooded and mud lay across the battlefront like a gigantic squid awaiting its prey. During 1916 a piece of German propaganda called The Archives of Reason was circulated in the Americas offering advice to those who wished their countries to join the Allies.‘Dig a trench shoulder high in your garden,’ it suggested, ‘fill it half full of water and get into it. Remain there for two or three days on an empty stomach. Furthermore, hire a lunatic to shoot at you with revolvers and machine-guns at close range. This arrangement is quite equal to a war and will cost your country very much less.’
Few pieces of propaganda have contained so high a proportion of the truth – not that this prevented the combatant Governments from condemning ever-increasing numbers of their countrymen to exactly such an existence. Neither were those countrymen allowed in training so graphic and accurate a description of their future abode and activity. They were, instead, shown diagrams of impressive symmetry and then later sent to such dry and well-drained areas as Salisbury Plain in England, where they duly translated the diagrams into physical facts.
Here, the trenches traversed back and forth in beautifully accurate lengths, the chalk of the Plain lending itself to the clean lines of exact right-angles. Firesteps were level and wide enough for the heavy boots of the men who stood upon them, sandbags were clean and properly stacked, grenade and ammunition shelves convenient but deep enough for safety. There was ample material for full revetting, and the duckboards fitted snugly over the sump channels; the latrines brought smiles of delight to the most pernickety inspecting general.
In these ideal trench systems, saps zig-zagged forward to neatly dug listening posts or perhaps to well-sited and sandbagged machine-gun nests, and with no hostile interference to impede the work, the barbed wire was neatly and tightly strung between its pickets – at night too, to give reality to the exercise (the pickets having been accurately sited and driven during the afternoon period of instruction) unless, of course, it had been raining too hard for the instructors. Communication trenches snaked superbly back to the support lines, shallowing as they went at the fixed and statutory rate, and when they eventual
ly shallowed up to ground level, it was usually alongside a deep pit with concrete base and semi-circular bastion in which stood a beautifully painted sign reading ‘Gun Pit’. To see the real thing one had to journey to Happy Valley, Larkhill.
Such was the ideal, and elderly generals brought back from retirement saw to it, with the aid of long-service NCOs, that the rag, tag and bobtail of the New Armies were smart and soldierly in appearance, and moreover knew how to retain that smartness when they went overseas. A few younger officers, recovering from wounds and awaiting their return to the front, did occasionally try to introduce some reality into the picture, but their efforts did not receive a great deal of support.
For the reality at the end of 1917 was something quite different.
An official report made at the time stated firmly that the British line was in no state whatsoever to withstand a determined attack. It was rarely sited to good advantage, having invariably been formed along the high-water mark of an attack. The protective wire belts were far too thin in number and flimsy in construction, machine-gun posts were inadequately sandbagged, traverses were sketchy, trenches insecurely revetted, while long stretches had little parados and no parapet: the sentries lay in grooves, or all too often behind barricades of piled bodies. There were few deep dug-outs, no deeply buried signal network, and the only concrete shelters were those captured from the Germans. (There is a decided note of pique in the report of one British Staff Officer, who indignantly complained that all the shelters which he inspected had been constructed with loopholes pointing in the wrong direction.)
© CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962
In theory, trenches were to be constructed like this.…
© CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962
...and laid out like this.
Communication trenches were few in number and had often been allowed to fall into disrepair, switch-lines having been used as supply trenches: these in turn had been allowed to drop to the defensive level of the purpose they served. In the back areas, the old British lines from which the Somme and Ypres offensives had been launched should, in theory, have been available as lines of deep defence, but with the British effort concentrated for so long upon attack, there had been no labour available for their upkeep. In places also, the French civilians had actually begun to fill in and clear away some of the rear lines of the British area, in order to restore the land to cultivation. Oddly enough there seems little evidence of their being allowed to follow this practice behind their own lines – but perhaps they did not consider it worth while to do so.
Artillery positions were usually in somewhat better case than those of the infantry, but close up behind the front line gun-emplacements were shallow scoops in the ground and relied far more upon canvas camouflage for protection than upon concrete. After firing a few rounds, even in icy weather, the ground beneath often broke up under the recoil, and the guns had to be dug out, re-sited and re-laid.
A revealing comment on the life lived in the trenches is given by Robert Graves. ‘The Western Front’, he says, ‘was known among its embittered inhabitants as The Sausage Machine, because it was fed with live men, churned out corpses, and remained firmly screwed in place.’ It did so moreover in conditions of appalling discomfort. In past summers every bursting shell had spread dirt and dust in vast floating clouds, and the flies multiplied in the filth and spread sickness and intolerable irritation: in wet weather the chaos was coated with slime. The least unpleasant conditions a front-line soldier could expect were those now reigning – hard frost – when at least the trenches and dug-outs could be kept clean and dry, although it might take half an hour’s energetic jumping up and down and arm-pounding to restore circulation after a spell on the firestep. But the climate in Flanders and Northern France had generally been too temperate to provide this relief. Humidity, not ice, had been the prevailing factor.
The stench, therefore, for most of the time was nauseating and inescapable. Stagnant mud, rotting half-buried bodies, stale human sweat and excrement, the pervading reek of chloride of lime, all these have haunted, for the remainder of their days, the memories of the men who occupied the trenches; and a malicious practice, common to both sides, was to lob occasional mortar bombs into enemy latrines with depressing effect. Often the lingering, sinister odour of phosgene or mustard gas condemned the soldiers to the sweating discomfort of rudimentary gas-masks for hours on end, while cordite and lyddite fumes were so much a part of the day-to-day existence as to be virtually unnoticeable; only the fragrance of burning wood, bubbling Maconachie stew (meat and veg) or frying bacon relieved occasionally the mephitic misery.
In the trenches, the British lived on bully-beef and stew, tasteless ration-biscuits which burnt well in time of fuel shortage, strong, dark brown tea made with condensed milk, and until the middle of 1917 there had been available for the front line troops an apparently inexhaustible supply of plum and apple jam; by 1918 some sectors were receiving jam of another flavour, but had been doing so for so long that they occasionally maundered nostalgically for the old days. A tot of rum for each man went into the tea at morning stand-to, but among the men there was little drunkenness in the line as, except for that ration, spirits were forbidden to them. Among the officers it was different, and gallons of whisky and cognac were consumed each night: but this may have been as palliative against the appalling strain and responsibility, and in any case there was little room in crowded dug-outs for furniture-smashing or riotous parties.
And all day and all night, along the entire length of the front and on both sides, were played the endless games of cards. The card-players were a race apart – uninterested in food except as essential fuel, uninterested in conversation other than call, curse or cackle of triumph, uninterested in the progress of the war or even the daily battle, except in so far as it took players from the table, or furnished new ones. These men may well have been the ones to find the most satisfactory cushion against the realities of life.
The realities of death were ever-present and inescapable, too; all but the most sensitive minds had grown callous in self-protection. Those too open and receptive drove their owners to madness, to suicide, or at best to bitter mockery, and the poets who retained their lives and sanities produced verse of searing power.
To these I turn, in these I trust,
Brother Lead and Sister Steel;
To his blind power I make appeal,
I guard her beauty clean from rust.…
wrote Siegfried Sassoon, and satirically offered it to a world which had become capable of believing that he meant it.
All day and every day, Death was present – and at night, the working parties and patrols went out to court it. From dusk until just before dawn they were out, hacking at the earth to carve connecting trenches between isolated posts or even between shell-holes which could be used by machine-gunners, driving iron screw-pickets or wooden stakes into the ground to support lines of hastily-draped barbed wire, lying close to enemy trenches all night in order to overhear their conversation; perhaps leaping into them, and after a few minutes’ nightmarish activity with bomb and bayonet, dragging back to their own lines some whimpering, blood-smeared prisoner, for the sake of a few morsels of incoherent military intelligence.
Draped on the wire belts were the bodies of the men killed during these white, nerve-racked, back-breaking nights. Some were killed by rifle-bullets as they crawled over the ground carrying coils of wire, some caught by scything machine-gun fire as they stood to fix the wire, some bombed by prowling patrols as they worked, hearing above their own exertions only the last few footfalls of the oncoming enemy, or the soft thud of the grenade as it landed at their feet. The entire trench system from the Channel to the Swiss frontier was dug, fortified and held by pain and death.
At any hour of the day or night, death or mutilation came from the guns. On the ice-hard ground the shells would burst with devastating violence, slivers of steel sighing or screaming as they sped through the frost-laden air to clatter on t
he ground or to thud dully into animate or inanimate obstruction. Each type of gun had its own noise, each type of shell its own evil. German 77-millimetre field artillery spat ‘whiz-bangs’ which arrived with the noise of giant fire-crackers: 5·9s threw out their shells with a vicious bark, the shells whining and growling over the valleys and ridges before ending their lives with violent, ill-tempered crashes. Heavy guns pounded the back areas with shells that roared overhead like express trains and smashed to earth with tremendous and awful effect; and every now and then minenwerfers would cough their black burdens into the air to wobble uncertainly in a terrifying parabola, and burst with wide obliteration in the trenches.
The infantry hated the artillery. They hated its wantonness, its random, murderous power, above all their defencelessness against it. It was like a primitive god, uncertain, inconsistent and unjust.
Against enemy infantry, the soldiers had at least the defence of their own skill and their sentries’ eyesight. During the day, these crouched for hours at their periscopes, constantly scanning the enemy positions and the ground between – and at night they lay out in forward posts, watching no-man’s-land in the pale-green, spectral light of the flares, listening to the continuous muffled drum-beat of limbers and ammunition columns, of lorries, horses and the million men who shuffled interminably behind the battlefronts.
All men took this duty in turn, but in the times when they were not occupied on the firestep or about the trenches, there was talk of home, desultory reading – and sleep: by 1918 they had months of arrears to make up. Tarnished strains of music from mouth-organ or gramophone floated through the British trenches in quiet times, invariably playing the song-hits from the London shows: ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, ‘Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. But the singers sang the trench ballads – obscene, ribald, some unbelievably bitter: