Very, Very, Very Dreadful

by Albert Marrin

  Planners, tragically, did not reckon on the effects of the new weapons developed since the 1880s, weapons that would be used for the first time in large-scale combat during the war. On the Western Front, where French, Belgian, and British armies opposed the German advance, machine guns, heavy artillery, and repeating rifles slaughtered entire units within minutes. On just one day, August 22, 1914, over 27,000 French soldiers died in battle. Afterward, a stunned captain found 300 of them lying in a perfectly straight line. “At the first whistling of bullets, the officers had cried ‘Line up!’ and all went to death as if on parade,” the captain later wrote. Young German soldiers called their horrific losses Kindermord, “the children’s massacre.”1

  Despite such carnage, the enemies were so evenly matched that neither side could strike a knockout blow. With the chances of surviving in the open so poor, soldiers had to go underground, taking shelter in trenches. By the fall of 1914, opposing trench lines snaked and zigzagged for 550 miles, from the French-Swiss border to the English Channel. The war, a German journalist wrote, had settled into a stalemate, which he called “a worldwide latrine with blood, barbed wire and hate songs.”2

  Latrine was a good word, for it is impossible to exaggerate the misery and squalor of the Western Front. “No Man’s Land” lay between the trench lines, a shattered zone, 50 to 250 yards wide, of shell craters, wrecked villages, charred forests, and barbed-wire entanglements. Soldiers lived in hollows dug into trench walls or in dugouts, cramped rooms dug as much as 25 feet underground. Emmanuel Bourcier, a French journalist, described dugouts as “really kennels [that stank] of the moldy moisture from the earth itself, of human perspiration, of wet leather and clothing….Everything was dismal, dangerous, frightful.” We can understand why the inhabitants called themselves “Death’s men”—human beings stuffed into the “sausage machine” of war, existing only to kill until killed themselves.3

  A German trench occupied by British soldiers at Ovillers-la-Boisselle, France, during the Battle of the Somme. The men are from A Company, Eleventh Battalion, the Cheshire Regiment. (July 1916) Credit 20

  Every day was an ordeal, “hell with the lid off.” In summer, the air shimmered under the blazing sun. In winter, the cold seemed to penetrate the human body’s every cell. “We don’t think of death,” a French soldier wrote his sweetheart. “But it’s the cold, the terrible cold! It seems to me at the moment that my blood is full of blocks of ice.”4

  When it rained, as it often did in Belgium and northern France, the front became a swamp of sticking, sucking mud. “The rain drives on,” recalled the English painter Paul Nash, “the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell-holes fill up with green-white water, the roads…are covered with inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat….It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.”5

  An unidentified sergeant and Henry Basil Ault, the company quartermaster sergeant of the Eleventh Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, in a flooded communication trench near Ploegsteert Wood, Belgium. (January 1917) Credit 21

  Trenches became waterlogged, forcing soldiers to stand knee-deep in mud for days. This led to “trench foot,” severe swelling that caused the skin on sufferers’ feet and legs to swell, crack, and peel off in sheets. Worse, for a thousand years farmers had fertilized the fields of Belgium and northern France with manure, their own and that of their animals. Therefore, the tiniest scratch or scrape let in germs and, with them, as an American noted, “an unprecedented riot of infection.” The result: “Every wound is infected and with an intensity unknown prior to 1914 either in civilian or military surgery.” Blood poisoning set in, and often minor wounds turned fatal for lack of antiseptics. Bacterial infections also led to thousands of leg amputations a week. Amputees might survive. But for the wounded left on the battlefield, the deep mud might as well have been quicksand. Injured men often drowned, pulled under before medics got to them.6

  The front, wrote the English poet Siegfried Sassoon, was “rotten with dead.” Rain and shelling constantly churned up bodies and body parts hastily buried just inches deep. The smell of rot filled the air, particularly during warm weather. There was no escaping it. A French soldier recalled: “We all had on us the stench of dead bodies. The bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank, everything we touched had a rotten smell.”7

  Soldiers stank, too. Unable to wash because what little fresh water they had was needed for drinking, they became grungy. French soldiers called themselves poilu and Germans Frontschweinen, “hairy ones” and “front-line pigs,” respectively, referring to their unshaven faces, filth, and evil smell. When large bodies of troops marched through a village, civilians shut their windows to keep out the odor. “Our master is our misery,” a Frenchman wrote. Another wrote that they were living “a life so frightfully bestial [that] even pigs are better off!”8

  German soldiers pick lice out of their undergarments. (c. 1915–1918) Credit 22

  Clothing and bodies crawled with lice, tiny insects that inject bacteria with each bite. Female lice were so fertile, said one poilu, that a louse born in the morning was a grandmother by evening. Lice carried “trench fever,” an infection causing high temperature and putting men out of action for a month, though seldom causing death. Typhus, another lice-borne disease, killed them. Whether a soldier got sick or not, a louse bite caused intense itching, rattling the most hard-bitten veteran. “I never thought a man would be driven to such a state of frenzy by a louse,” a rookie noted. The words lousy and crummy—because lice were the color of toasted bread crumbs—came to mean anything nasty or unpleasant. Whenever possible, soldiers took time out to “read their shirts,” picking lice out of the seams and crushing them between their fingers.9

  A typical trench-rat haul. Small dogs helped flush rats into the open. (1916) Credit 23

  Then there were the rats “bigger than cats.” Grown fat from feasting on the dead, a single pair could produce 880 babies a year. Soldiers dreaded rats as carriers of bubonic plague, and their incessant squeaking rang in men’s ears. Squatting over a latrine risked exposing one’s backside to their bite. At night, rats scampered among the sleeping men. They nosed into pockets for food or nibbled on ears, lips, and noses. Even worse, the red-eyed demons “would eat a wounded man if he couldn’t defend himself.” A French patrol once came upon several corpses. “I saw some rats running from under the dead men’s greatcoats,” a soldier wrote. “My heart pounded as we edged toward one of the bodies….The man displayed a grimacing face, stripped of flesh; his skull bare, the eyes devoured, and from the yawning mouth leapt a rat.” Rats liked to start with the eyes, eventually reducing the body to a skeleton. Soldiers loathed them, staging “ratting hunts” with pistols, shovels, and clubs.10

  Front-line troops lived under continual stress. Rats and lice, fear and noise, made restful sleep impossible. “I felt I would barter my soul for a few hours of uninterrupted slumber,” a soldier noted. “What kills,” said another, “is the absence of sleep.” Lack of sleep left men confused, listless—and careless.11

  To survive, a soldier had to consider his every movement, since enemy snipers shot anyone who showed himself for even an instant. Moreover, a new weapon, the airplane, appeared in large numbers. In 1903, two bicycle repairers from Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, had built the first successful heavier-than-air flying machine. Idealists, the Wright brothers believed aviation would abolish war. “[It] will prevent war,” Orville declared, “by making it too expensive, too slow, too difficult, too long drawn out.” They could not have been more wrong. By 1915, “winged death” swooped over enemy trenches without warning, dropping bombs and spraying machine-gun bullets.12

  However, nothing compared to attacking across No Man’s Land. Every attack began with an artillery bombardment to weaken and disorient the defenders. Heavy guns massed behind the trench lines fired day and night, often for a week, pausing only to let the overheated gun barrels cool. Sound waves struck the gunners’ ears like fists, making them ring,
even causing lifelong deafness.

  Soldiers of an Australian Fourth Division field artillery brigade on a duckboard track passing through Château Wood, near Hooge, Belgium. (1917) Credit 24

  Bombardments were an ordeal for the assault troops huddled in their trenches, awaiting the order to advance. “The sound waves were going over your head all the time, like a tuning fork being struck on your steel helmet,” a British soldier wrote. “A terrible sound—ping, ping, ping, ping—this terrible vibration day and night and this noise in your head…went right through you. You couldn’t get away from it. It went right down into your nerves.” Sometimes, when shells fell short, men died from “friendly fire”—that is, an attack coming from one’s own side. No fewer than 75,000 French troops were killed or wounded by their own artillery.13

  Soldiers on the bombardment’s receiving end could only hunker down and pray under “a tornado of bursting shells.” A young German soldier named Adolf Hitler was traumatized by what he called “the everlasting artillery fire.” Years later, as Germany’s dictator, he could go on for five minutes at a time with imitations of the different sounds the shells made as they flew through the air. But a shell had no mind; it exploded harmlessly or among those whose bad luck it was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The ground shook. Geysers of earth leaped into the air. Sharp metal splinters zinged and whooshed in all directions. The splinters decapitated men, sliced them in half, or simply passed them by. Explosions crippled men or blew them to bits; many soldiers vanished in a red spray. Trenches and dugouts caved in, burying everyone.14

  Grown men became children again, crying, “Mommy,” “Maman,” and “Mutti.” They cringed, whimpering like scared puppies, “Oh, God, make it stop!” Many cracked up from “shell shock,” a mental disorder brought on by intense, prolonged fear. An English doctor described how men in “the flower and vigor of youth” became “doddering palsied wrecks, quivering at a sound, dreading the visions of the night.” Many recovered with rest in a safe place; many others remained mental wrecks.15

  Heavy artillery fire from the British Royal Tank Regiment. (c. 1917) Credit 25

  When the bombardment lifted, the attacking infantry charged into No Man’s Land. By then, the defenders had emerged from cover and were ready to receive them. Answering artillery, machine-gun, and rifle fire slaughtered the oncoming troops. Few attacks gained ground, much less overran the enemy trenches. Attackers suffered frightful losses. For example, on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British took nearly 60,000 casualties, of whom 19,000 lost their lives. The battle raged until November, costing both sides over a million casualties. Yet the trench lines held firm.16

  In 1915, the Germans used poison gas for the first time, and the Allies answered in kind. This “breath from the depths of hell,” as a French writer called poison gas, began the age of what we call weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The gases were released from artillery shells or steel canisters planted in the ground downwind from the enemy. The most-used types, chlorine and mustard gas, looked and smelled different. Chlorine gas formed a light green haze and smelled like strong laundry bleach. Mustard gas was a dark yellow vapor that smelled like mustard, onion, or garlic.17

  Both types of gas blinded soldiers, burned their flesh, and choked them. The “lucky” ones went quickly, but most suffered for several days. A journalist described what he saw in the gas ward of a French field hospital: “As you walked down the aisle by the rows of cots, you could see how the different ones were suffering. Some of them in places where their eyes were, were just large bleeding scabs; others their mouths were just one mass of sores; others had their hands up, and there were terrible burns beneath their arms, where the gas had attacked the moisture there.”18

  A soldier caught in a gas attack without his mask. (c. 1915–1918) Credit 26

  The gas mask, a clumsy rubber-and-canvas device containing charcoal to purify the air a soldier breathed, was the only shield against the deadly vapors. Special masks also provided protection for war dogs, horses, and donkeys, which suffered as badly as humans. Poison gas had only one thing in its favor: it reduced the rat population for a day or two.

  Still the war dragged on.

  A donkey in an ill-fitting gas mask. Many animals succumbed to the effects of poison gas because of a lack of specialized equipment. (Date unknown) Credit 27

  AMERICA GOES TO WAR

  By 1917, it was clear that victory would have little to do with brilliant generalship or raw courage. It would go to the side best able to keep stuffing the most men into the “sausage machine” until enemy resistance broke. Allied leaders counted on the United States to tilt the balance in their favor. Repeatedly, they urged President Woodrow Wilson to make an all-out effort to send an army as quickly as possible. The AEF, short for American Expeditionary Force, would be the United States’ first mass army to fight overseas.

  America mobilized for war. In the past, when nations fought, military action had little direct impact on civilians unless they had the bad luck to live in a battle zone. Usually, civilians went about their business as if the fighting were raging on a distant planet. This war was different. It began the era of total war, which could be waged only by harnessing the entire society for the effort. The “home front” became as vital as the fighting front. In a sense, civilians became soldiers, working in factories and on the land to produce whatever the fighters needed.

  Within weeks of declaring war on Germany, the United States began to marshal its resources. By law, scores of federal boards, bureaus, offices, and agencies reshaped the peacetime economy to meet wartime needs. They decided what goods factories could manufacture, what materials they could use, and what their owners could charge. Railroads had to give priority to moving troops, weapons, and raw materials. Ocean liners became troopships. Labor unions gave no-strike pledges for the duration of the war; strikers could be drafted, fined, or given long prison terms. The government’s main task, however, was to form the AEF, train it, and send it safely across the Atlantic Ocean. But none of this could happen without safeguarding the soldiers’ health.

  General William Crawford Gorgas. (Date unknown) Credit 28

  The U.S. War Department recruited a top-notch medical team to advise it on needed health measures and design programs to make them work. The surgeon general of the army, William Crawford Gorgas (1854–1920), had discovered how to control malaria and yellow fever by destroying the mosquitoes that carried the disease-causing parasites and viruses. Victor C. Vaughan (1851–1929) was dean of the medical school at the University of Michigan. Rufus Cole (1872–1966) served as director of the Rockefeller University Hospital in New York City. Simon Flexner (1863–1946) headed the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. William H. Welch (1850–1934), of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, was the dean of American medicine. The soft-spoken, gray-bearded Welch was past president of the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  Dr. Victor C. Vaughan. (Date unknown) Credit 29

  These men knew medical history. Battle, horrible as it was, had always killed fewer soldiers than had disease. War and disease were opposite sides of the same lethal coin. Armies were ideal vehicles for crowd diseases; their gathering inevitably brought serious health problems. Few civilians, even in developed Western countries, traveled long distances, and limited contact among them usually checked the spread of infectious diseases. In wartime, however, large bodies of men were constantly on the move. Recruits from different disease environments—from urban slums, rural villages, and isolated farms—crowded into training camps. They slept close to each other, ate together, showered together, and breathed the same air. Combat made matters worse because hardship, stress, fatigue, exposure, and poor hygiene weakened resistance to infectious diseases.

  Such diseases were part of the American military experience. We have few statistics about the F
rench and Indian War (1754–1763), but private letters and official reports mention the ravages of smallpox and typhoid fever. During the American War of Independence (1775–1783), George Washington’s battered army camped at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in the winter of 1777–1778. Besides the diseases already mentioned, dysentery—uncontrollable diarrhea caused by bacterial infection—was a common killer. “How’re your bowels?” soldiers asked, half in jest.19

  During the Civil War (1861–1865), four Union army soldiers died of sickness for every one killed in battle, and two out of three deaths in the Confederate army resulted from infectious diseases. On each side, measles was the leading killer of soldiers. Measles usually infects children, causing coughing, a rash, and other discomfort, but seldom death. When, however, the disease strikes adults, it is merciless. An official Union army report described its impact on military operations: “Frequently from one-third to one-half of the effective strength [of a regiment] was attacked [by measles]….No part of the army escaped.” The chilling conclusion: “For all troops, there was a much greater chance of dying from disease than in the heat of battle.” Civil War soldiers were five times as likely to die of an infectious disease as civilians who stayed home.20