Express & Star

Living hell on the front line

The trenches were a living hell for soldiers serving on the front line in the First World War.

Published

They became both the battle ground of the conflict and the final resting place for millions of young men, some as young as 14 years old.

Most of those who fought in the trenches were not really solders. They were either volunteers who gave up their everyday jobs to serve their country in its time of need or people ordered to enlist.

After six weeks of basic training, they were often sent to war ill-prepared for the unimaginable horrors that lay ahead of them.

And they were shot down in their thousands trying to go over the top into the enemy trenches, many before they had even travelled 50 yards.

Holes in the ground were home to millions of soldiers as the war stagnated and although many died in battle others were killed by disease or infection brought on by the dreadful conditions they had to endure.

Soldiers take a break to go fishing before they are recalled to action. Courtesy of the Staffordshire Regimental Museum

The soldiers could not wash because of the limited water supply and the lice that thrived in the cramped conditions gave them Tench Fever, a particularly painful disease that began suddenly with severe pain followed by high fever which took up to 12 weeks to recover from.

This meant that company commanders were urged to ensure their men had hot baths wherever possible even if that meant turning farm equipment into a makeshift tub and getting comrades to shower them with jugs of hot water.

Tommies – the nickname given to a British private – still tried to put a brave face on the misery that was made worse by atrocious weather.

For instance men from C Company 1/6th South Staffs managed to muster a smile for the camera from their trench near Ypres in 1915.

Communications were another problem. The telephone was the preferred means of passing messages since it allowed commanders to give orders directly to those on the front line.

The telegraph was very effective at sending a message over distance, but each one had first to be written out, transmitted and then transcribed by the receiving operator.

Both telephone and telegraph were lighter and more portable than radio but depended on landlines which were unreliable and often broken by either clumsy soldiers or enemy fire. It was not uncommon for signallers to fix 40 cable breaks a day. Radio was still in its infancy and hopelessly unreliable and so other tried and tested methods were brought into operation like the 3,000-year-old way of delivering a message: the carrier pigeon. At the start of the war the British had just 60 pigeons and 15 handlers in the war zone.

By 1918 there were more than 20,000 pigeons and 370 handlers.

Signal pigeons being sent from the trenches by Staffordshire soldiers

Pigeons could fly over 100 miles at an average speed of 50 mph and when it arrived back at its home loft the bird would trigger a wire that rang a bell and alerted the handler.

In 1914 during the First Battle of the Marne, the French army advanced 72 pigeon lofts with the troops while the US Army Signal Corps used 600 pigeons in France alone. One of these, a Blue Check hen named Cher Ami, was awarded the French 'Croix de Guerre with Palm' for heroic service delivering 12 important messages during the Battle of Verdun. On her final mission in October 1918, she delivered a message despite having been shot through the breast or wing.

The crucial message, found in the capsule hanging from a ligament of her shattered leg, reportedly saved about 200 US soldiers of the 77th Infantry Division.

They were harder to shoot than human runners or dogs, were fast and also easy to carry around with an impressive 95 per cent their messages making it back from the trenches. The pigeons were so important to the war effort that harming them became a criminal offence and they were given special protection from a gas attack. The only snag was that it was one-way traffic since they could not return with a reply. Even so, they proved an invaluable way of telling HQ about a retreat or an advance.

The First World War ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era and led to mass slaughter on all sides.

The 1/6th South Staffords bathing in a barn in Flanders, 1915. Courtesy of the Staffordshire Regimental Museum

Of the total 65 million men mobilised across the globe, 8.5 million were killed. Almost one million British soldiers, sailors and airmen died and almost two million more were permanently disabled. Worst hit were the Allied countries of Russia and France who each lost three quarters of their troops to death or injury.

It was the first war to involve nations from around the world – 28 in all – and had been triggered by the bullet that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand

But by the end of the conflict, that single shot had also brought the collapse of three great empires – the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman – and the devastation of Europe. Germany, Russia, France and, on August 4, Great Britain were all drawn into the war, mainly because they were involved in treaties that obligated them to defend certain other nations.

Western and eastern fronts quickly opened along the borders of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The first weeks of fighting were a mish-mash of 19th-century and 20th-century warfare, with cavalry charges mixed up with machine guns.

Later in the conflict Churchill introduced the first tanks on to the battlefields, and aeroplanes were used on a large scale for the first time.

But alongside these modern weapons of war, the horse and cart still carried artillery and supplies to the front line. The first month of the war was full of attacks and huge troop movements on both fronts. But following the Battle of the Marne between September 5-9, the fighting became defensive. Both sides dug in and a line of trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss border created a line known as the Western Front.

What was meant to be a quick war, 'over by Christmas', turned into four years of attrition.

The Germans were fighting to reach the North Sea to cut off Allied supply routes and the Allies were trying to push them back. Although millions of soldiers died attempting to win ground, from 1914 to 1918 the Western Front fluctuated by only a few miles in either direction. Gains were made, and then lost again.

The fighting between exhausted troops continued until, in 1918, the Germans lost a number of individual battles and gradually began to fall back.

At the same time, a deadly outbreak of 'flu took heavy tolls on soldiers of both sides. Eventually, Germany and Austria-Hungary began to lose control as their soldiers started to mutiny.

The war ended in the late autumn of 1918 when the member countries of the Central Powers signed armistice agreements one by one, Germany being the last on November 11, 1918.

See tomorrow's Express & Star for reports on the Gallipoli Campaign and the Battle of Loos.

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