LIFE AND DEATH IN THE DITCH

A trench was not a ditch but a system, and the system was designed to be hard to hit and hard to take. Seen from the air, a British front-line trench looked like a castle wall laid on its side: it was dug in a series of straight bays, each perhaps ten yards long, separated by solid blocks of earth called traverses. The zigzag had a plain purpose. A shell landing in one bay, or a raider who jumped into the trench, could harm only that bay, and a machine gun could not sweep a long straight length of trench from end to end.

Behind the front, or fire, trench ran a second line, the support trench, perhaps 70 to 100 yards back, and a third, the reserve line, several hundred yards behind that. Between the lines ran communication trenches, usually zigzagged as well, which carried rations, ammunition, messages and relieving troops forward and the wounded back. Trenches were named, because in a maze people get lost. British sectors acquired "Piccadilly", "Regent Street" and "Shaftesbury Avenue"; the signboards were official, hand-lettered, and sometimes surprisingly witty.

A good fire trench was six or seven feet deep. Along the front wall ran the fire step, a ledge about 18 inches above the floor on which a rifleman stood to shoot over the parapet, the bank of earth and sandbags in front. Behind lay the parados, a similar bank that shielded against shells bursting to the rear. The walls were held up with revetments of timber, wire netting, corrugated iron or woven wicker hurdles, and the floor was laid with duckboards (slatted wooden walkways) over a drainage sump, so that men's feet stayed, in theory, out of the water. Narrow saps ran forward from the front line into no man's land, ending in listening posts or in jumping-off points for an attack. In front of it all stood belts of barbed wire, sometimes 30 or 50 yards deep, strung between pickets in tangles and "knife rests" that no soldier could cross in a hurry.

Wet ground, dry ground

Geology decided a great deal. On the chalk of the Somme and Champagne, trenches could be cut deep, stayed relatively dry, and stood up well. In Flanders the water table lay within two or three feet of the surface, the clay held water like a bowl, and a hole filled as fast as it was dug. British engineers there built breastworks instead: walls of sandbags and earth raised above ground level, which were shelled flat in a day and rebuilt at night. Dugouts, where they existed, were shallow, cramped and wet.

German depth, Allied improvisation

The Germans, having conquered ground they intended to keep, built to last. When the British reached the German lines on the Somme in 1916 they found dugouts 20 feet deep, and in places 30 or more, reached by long flights of steps, lined with timber, fitted with bunks and sometimes with electric light. These shelters survived a week of bombardment, which is precisely why the bombardment failed to kill the garrison before the infantry went forward. From 1917, in Flanders, the Germans added concrete shelters (Mannschafts-Eisenbetonunterstände, or Mebus; the British called them pillboxes) with walls a yard thick that shrugged off anything but a direct hit from a heavy shell. British and French doctrine, by contrast, long treated the trench as a temporary expedient on the road to a breakthrough, and the "offensive spirit" discouraged elaborate defensive works.

The Germans also learned to disperse their defense. In 1915 Erich von Falkenhayn ordered a second position built two to three kilometers behind the first. During the Somme battle, the staff officer Fritz von Loßberg worked out the next step, a defense in depth: a thinly held forward zone, a battle zone behind it where the attackers were broken up, and counterattack divisions held back to retake what was lost. The doctrine was issued to the whole army on 1 December 1916 as Principles of Command in the Defensive Battle. The Hindenburg Line (the Siegfried Position), built that winter by Russian prisoners of war and German engineers, was its monument: belts of wire up to 100 yards deep, concrete machine-gun posts, deep dugouts, and a series of lines. The Germans withdrew to it in March 1917 (see chapter VI), laying waste to the country they gave up. The British adopted a similar scheme for their own lines in 1917 and early 1918, but on 21 March 1918 some of it was still unfinished (see chapter VII).

The day in a front-line trench began and ended in the half-light. Dawn and dusk were the moments when an attack was most likely, since there was enough shadow to hide an approach and enough light to see by, so the entire garrison "stood to": every man up on the fire step, bayonet fixed, rifle loaded, staring into the gray. After half an hour or so came "stand down", and in British units, at the commanding officer's discretion, the rum ration, a small tot from stone jars marked SRD (officially for Supply Reserve Depot; soldiers' versions included "Seldom Reaches Destination" and "Service Rum Diluted"). Rum was not a daily right, as a legend suggests; it was issued in cold weather, after a bad night, or before an attack. The French poilu had his pinard, red wine, issued at a quarter of a liter a day in the early war and raised to half a liter in 1916, and the Germans had beer and schnapps whenever supply allowed.

After stand-down came breakfast: bacon fried on a brazier made from a perforated biscuit tin, tea brewed with a "Tommy's cooker", and the first of the day's inspections of rifles and feet. In daylight the front was usually silent, because anyone who showed his head above the parapet risked a sniper's bullet. Men slept in dugouts, cleaned weapons, wrote letters, deloused their clothes, or repaired the trench that the night's shelling had undone. The real work was done after dark. Parties went out to mend the wire, carried ammunition and rations from the communication trench to the front, filled sandbags, dug, and patrolled. On a typical night many more men were outside the trench than inside it.

Sentries stood watch on the fire step in shifts, commonly two hours on and four off, looking through periscopes or through slits in a steel plate. Falling asleep at a post was a capital offense under the Army Act, and two British soldiers were shot for it.

The nightly relief

The most dangerous routine was the relief, the replacement of one battalion by another. It took place at night, through the communication trenches, with hundreds of men loaded with kit, in pitch darkness, at the places the enemy gunners had on their maps. A relief might take hours; men got lost, tangled and shelled. Wilfred Owen's lines about the men who "cursed through sludge" capture the mood. Everyone knew that the relieving battalion had walked into the fire that the relieved men had been enduring for days.

Wastage

Staff officers had a clinical term for what quiet sectors cost: "wastage", the steady attrition of men to snipers, shells, mortars and accident. It amounted to hundreds of casualties across the BEF on days when nothing at all was happening. That steady loss, over a front of 440 miles for four years, was the hidden subtraction behind the famous battles.

Live and let live

Between the two great opposing lines, an unspoken truce often grew. The sociologist Tony Ashworth, in Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (1980), showed that in quiet sectors the opposing sides often settled into a ritualized arrangement. Rifle fire was aimed high. Meal times were respected. Retaliation was proportional: shell us and we shell you, but not more. Everybody understood the "Morning Hate", a deliberate burst of firing at dawn that was followed by silence. The system's great enemy was the high command, which regarded such peace as a sign of lost "offensive spirit" and countered it with raids, sniping drives and artillery programs designed to keep the enemy off balance. The famous Christmas Truce of 1914 was the best-known eruption of the same urge (see chapter III); it was never repeated on the same scale, because orders were issued to prevent it.

Between the two front lines lay a stretch of cratered, wire-strewn ground that soldiers called, with bitter accuracy, no man's land. Its width varied enormously. At Hill 60 near Ypres, and at Quinn's Post on Gallipoli, the opposing trenches were within 15 to 30 yards of each other, and grenades were thrown back and forth across the gap. On the Somme the distance could be 200 to 500 yards; in places on the Eastern Front, a mile or more. The land belonged to nobody by day and to everybody by night.

The night was the time for work. The most common errand was the wiring party: a dozen or more men crawled out with coils of barbed wire, wooden stakes and screw pickets (iron stakes with a corkscrew point, introduced precisely so that they could be twisted into the ground quietly instead of hammered). Overhead, the enemy sent up flares, Very lights and star shells, which lit the ground in a ghastly white; the drill was to freeze, face down, and wait for the light to die. Machine guns on fixed lines would sweep the likely approaches at random intervals, and a man caught standing when one opened up usually was hit.

Patrols were smaller and quieter. Two or three men, or an officer and a sergeant, crept out to examine the enemy wire, to listen for work parties, to find gaps and to bring back anything that identified the enemy unit opposite. Listening posts in the saps did the same job while sitting still. Snipers, who began the war as marksmen with ordinary rifles, ended it as specialists with telescopic sights, camouflage suits and observers. The British established sniping schools, notably under Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard in 1916, in order to win back control of no man's land after a bad year in 1915. A soldier could be killed for exposing a hand or a tin hat above the parapet; to find a sniper's position, men raised dummy heads or helmets on sticks and watched where the bullet entered.

The trench raid

By 1916 the raid had become a regular instrument, especially on the British and Canadian fronts. A raiding party of 20 to 100 men, often rehearsed on a full-scale replica of the target trench, crossed no man's land under the cover of a short barrage, jumped into the enemy trench, killed or captured what they found, bombed dugouts, and returned within a few minutes. The objectives were practical: to seize a prisoner for interrogation, since the identity of the unit opposite told the staff which formation was on the front and whether a relief was due; to cut enemy wire; to damage a mine gallery; and to keep the enemy nervous. The Canadians raided especially heavily along Vimy Ridge in the winter of 1916–17, in preparation for the Easter assault in April.

Raids were a favorite of the high command and a source of dread for many soldiers. The prisoners and information they brought back saved the staff much guesswork, but a raid could cost more men than it was worth, and each one provoked reprisal shelling that fell on troops who had taken no part. Critics, including many front-line officers, saw them as a way of satisfying the doctrine of "domination of no man's land" at the expense of lives; supporters pointed to the intelligence gained and the damage to enemy morale. The Germans raided in turn, with specially trained storm detachments (Stoßtruppen) that practiced the methods that would later break the Allied line (see chapter X).

The ground also held the dead. Men who fell in an attack and could not be recovered lay on the wire or in shell holes for days, weeks, sometimes until the front moved. Burying parties went out in the dark to collect identity discs and what could be carried. Occasionally the two sides agreed to a short truce to clear the dead from between the lines, as at Christmas 1914. Most of the time they simply lay there, and the soldiers, passing, learned not to look.

An infantryman in the trenches could expect to meet danger from at least five directions: the enemy, the weather, the ground, vermin and disease. Several of these killed fewer men than the first, but they made the life miserable in a way that outlasted the war in the memory of everyone who endured it.

Rats. The brown rat thrived on the Western Front as no other creature did. It fed on discarded rations and on the dead, grew large, and moved through dugouts and trenches in numbers that men never forgot. Soldiers shot them, bayoneted them, hunted them with terriers, and lost sleep and food to them. The rats also carried disease, notably the leptospirosis known as Weil's disease, and an officer's account of a rat running across a sleeping man's face is a stock scene of memoirs on both sides.

Lice. Nearly every soldier was infested. The body louse lived in the seams of uniforms and underclothing and bit, constantly, leaving red welts; the ritual of searching a shirt seam and cracking the lice with a thumbnail or burning them with a cigarette end was called "chatting" in the British Army, from "chat", soldiers' slang for a louse. Delousing stations, using steam disinfectors or hot baths in brewery vats, helped, but the eggs survived in the clothes and the men were reinfested within days. The lice also carried the disease called trench fever, a recurrent fever with leg pain that could keep a man in hospital for weeks. Its louse-borne cause was demonstrated only in 1918.

Trench foot. Standing for days in cold water, in boots that never dried, starves the feet of circulation. The skin goes numb, blue, swollen and then (in the worst cases) gangrenous, and men sometimes had to be carried out of the line on stretchers. About 20,000 men of the BEF were treated for it in the winter of 1914–15 alone. By 1915 the army knew the preventive routine: inspect the feet daily, rub them with whale oil, change into dry socks (a man was supposed to carry three pairs), and, crucially, hold the battalion commander responsible. The French called it pied de tranchée. "Trench mouth", a painful gum infection, also took its name from the war.

Mud and cold. The Flanders plain is low clay country laced with drainage ditches. Shelling destroyed the ditches, rain filled the shell craters, and the soil became a sticky paste. During the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, rain in August and October transformed the battlefield into a swamp in which duckboards sank, mules disappeared and wounded men drowned in shell holes. Cold was as bad: the winter of 1916–17 froze the ground so hard that trenches could not be repaired and food froze in the tins.

Food and water. Armies on the Western Front were well fed by the standards of earlier wars. The British ration was built around bully beef, hard biscuit, tinned jam (the notorious plum and apple), Maconochie stew, bread when it could be had, and above all tea. Food was cooked in field kitchens ("cookers") a mile or two behind the line and carried forward at night in containers; by the time it arrived it was usually cold. The French poilu ate "singe" (tinned beef), soup, bread and, when he could, drank the pinard and the jus (coffee). German front-line rations stayed better than those of civilians at home, but as the British blockade bit (see chapter XI), turnips, ersatz coffee and stretched bread reached the front too, especially after the hungry winter of 1916–17. Drinking water was transported in whatever tins were handy, treated with chloride of lime, and tasted of both.

The smell. Almost every memoir mentions it: the sweetish stench of decay, mixed with chloride of lime, latrines, cordite, wet wool and unwashed bodies. Trenches dug through old battlefields turned up bodies in the walls. Because the smell was inescapable, soldiers learned to ignore it, which strikes many readers as the oddest detail of all.

Typhoid, the great killer of the Boer War, was almost absent, because the British Army encouraged inoculation, and sanitation was enforced with some success. Sickness was nevertheless the major reason for evacuation from the front in several theaters. In the trench war of the west, the biggest killer of all remained high explosive.

"Going over the top" was the phrase for climbing out of the trench, over the parapet, to attack across no man's land. It was the moment the whole machinery of the trench system existed to prevent for the enemy, and to achieve for the attacker, and most men who experienced it never forgot a minute of it.

The attack began long before the whistle. For days, sometimes weeks, an Allied bombardment pounded the enemy lines. On the Somme in 1916 it lasted seven days and fired more than 1.5 million shells. Meanwhile the infantry were moved into forward assembly trenches, packed so tightly that men could barely move, in a darkness full of fear. Each carried a rifle, bayonet, 120 or more rounds of ammunition, grenades, a spade or a pick, sandbags, wire cutters, rations, a gas helmet and a water bottle; on 1 July 1916 many carried 60 to 70 pounds. An officer would walk down the line. Rum was issued. Men wrote the "last letter", or tried not to think. A hot breakfast was served where the kitchens could manage it.

At zero hour, on the Somme 7:30 a.m., the barrage "lifted" from the front trench to the one behind, officers blew their whistles, and the men climbed ladders and scrambled over the sandbags. The sound was overwhelming. The guns thundered, the shells went over, the ground shook, and then, as the barrage moved on, a new noise rose from the enemy side: machine guns. The Germans had sheltered in deep dugouts; when the barrage lifted, they raced up the steps with their guns, and in many sectors the British found the German parapet manned before they had crossed half the gap.

What followed depended on whether the preparation had worked. Where it had, the infantry reached the enemy trench, fought hand to hand with bombs, bayonets and clubs, and "mopped up" dugouts with grenades while engineers and carrying parties came up behind. Where it had not, they were stopped in front of uncut wire or cut down in no man's land. Surviving men lay in shell holes through the day, unable to move, hoping for dark. At the Accrington Pals' attack at Serre on 1 July, about 720 men went forward and some 580 were casualties within the first half hour, among them 235 dead. The whole British Army lost 57,470 men that day, of whom 19,240 were killed (see chapter V).

Even a success could be a trap. A captured trench faced the wrong way and had no wire, no shelter and no communication back; the new garrison had to turn the parapet around, dig in, bring ammunition up, and wait for the inevitable counterattack and the enemy artillery, which now had the range of its own former trenches. Soldiers often described the aftermath, the hours of consolidation under fire, as worse than the assault.

The formula changed over time. In 1915 attacks were ordered in dense lines of "waves", following the British doctrine of the day. By 1917 the platoon had been reorganized into specialist sections: riflemen, bombers (grenadiers), rifle-grenadiers and Lewis gunners, working together in loose formation behind a creeping barrage. The Germans, in turn, adopted infiltration tactics (see chapter X). The experience of attack in 1918 differed greatly from that of 1915, which is why generalizations about "the" trench attack mislead.

A soldier hit by a shell fragment in a trench began a journey that was, by the standards of the age, remarkably well organized. The British Army's evacuation chain was designed to take a wounded man from the point of injury to a surgeon, and eventually to a bed in England, with as little delay as possible, and by 1916–17 it moved on a scale that no previous war had required.

1. Regimental stretcher-bearers, men from the battalion itself (about 16 in a British battalion, traditionally drawn from the band), found the wounded man, applied a field dressing from the pocket sewn into every tunic, and carried him to the Regimental Aid Post.
2. The Regimental Aid Post (RAP) was a dugout or cellar near the front line, run by the battalion's medical officer with a few orderlies. He checked the dressing, gave morphine, anti-tetanus serum and a cup of tea, and sent the man on.
3. Bearers from the Field Ambulance carried him to an Advanced Dressing Station and then a Main Dressing Station, still within shell range, where men were sorted and given first treatment.
4. A motor ambulance or a horse-drawn wagon took the man to a Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), usually 7 to 12 miles behind the line, often beside a railway. These were hospitals under canvas and in huts, with surgeons, anesthetists and nurses, where the major operations of the war were performed. In a big battle a single CCS could receive hundreds of wounded in a day, and on the worst days more than a thousand.
5. From the CCS a hospital train took the man to a base hospital in a coastal town such as Étaples, Rouen, Le Havre or Boulogne, and from there a hospital ship carried him across the Channel. A wound that was bad enough to send a man home was called a "Blighty one", and was often prayed for.

The French system followed a similar pattern, with postes de secours at the front, divisional ambulances, and evacuation hospitals (hôpitaux d'évacuation) behind the lines, where triage decided who could travel. The French also developed mobile surgical units, the autochir, which brought the operating theater up close to the front. The Germans organized a similar chain of Truppenverbandplatz, Hauptverbandplatz and Feldlazarett.

The weak point in the chain was the first stage. Stretcher-bearers worked under fire, often in mud, and four men could take hours to carry one casualty a mile. At the Somme on 1 July 1916 and at Passchendaele a year later, men lay out in no man's land for a day or two before they were found. Many died there. At the opposite end, the best hospitals were impressive: by 1917 the hospitals at Étaples held more than 20,000 beds, and the system, as a whole, returned a large share of its patients to some form of duty.

Not every injury was an accident of battle. Some men shot themselves in the hand or foot hoping for a Blighty one. A self-inflicted wound was treated as a crime, and medical officers looked for powder burns around the injury. Men found guilty were imprisoned, and in rare cases shot.

For those who died, the system also had a role. Chaplains and burial parties collected the bodies when they could, and the Graves Registration Units (formed in 1915) recorded and marked the graves. Many dead could not be identified or recovered: the Menin Gate at Ypres records more than 54,000 names of British and Commonwealth soldiers with no known grave, and the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme more than 72,000. Their number is the other face of the evacuation chain: the one for those who did not make the journey.

In the first months of the war, doctors at the front noticed something strange: men with no wound at all who could not walk, speak, see or remember. Some trembled uncontrollably; some were mute or deaf; some wept or stared; some had lost the use of a limb without any injury. The first explanation was physical: the "wind" or concussion of a nearby shell had somehow damaged the nerves. On 13 February 1915 the Cambridge psychologist and army doctor Charles Myers published an article in The Lancet, "A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock", describing three such soldiers, and the name stuck. Myers himself later regretted it, since many cases occurred in men who had never been near a shell.

The numbers became too great to ignore. By 1918 the British Army had recorded something like 80,000 cases. The official response was confused. From 1915 the army distinguished between "shell shock (W)" for wounded and "shell shock (S)" for sick: only the first entitled a man to a wound stripe and a pension. In 1917 the term was officially discouraged and replaced by the blander "NYD(N)", "not yet diagnosed (nervous)". It was a fight over words that concealed a fight over meaning: was the man a casualty or a coward?

Treatments

Treatments varied wildly with the doctor and the patient's rank. Myers, appointed consulting psychologist to the British armies in France in 1916, established the principle of treating men close to the front, quickly, with rest and the expectation of recovery; the policy, later summarized as "proximity, immediacy, expectancy", sent most cases back to duty within days. Officers, who were diagnosed with the more respectable "neurasthenia", were sent to special hospitals and given a rest cure. Soldiers' symptoms were more likely to be called hysteria. Treatments were hotly contested. At the National Hospital in Queen Square, London, Lewis Yealland treated mutism and paralysis with painful electric current to the throat and limbs until the patient spoke or moved, a method he described with proud candor in his book Hysterical Disorders of Warfare (1918). Arthur Hurst at Seale Hayne in Devon used occupational activity, persuasion and a remarkable film, War Neuroses, to show his cures. And at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, W. H. R. Rivers, an anthropologist and neurologist, used talking: he encouraged patients to confront and discuss their war memories, not suppress them.

Military justice

The army's disciplinary code treated cowardice, desertion, sleeping on duty, quitting a post and mutiny as capital offenses. A Field General Court Martial could pass a death sentence; it was confirmed or commuted by successive layers of command up to the Commander-in-Chief. The proceedings were often short: Private Harry Farr, who had been treated for shell shock and who refused to return to the line in the autumn of 1916 saying he could not stand it, was tried in a trial said to have lasted about 20 minutes and was shot in October. The accused had no lawyer, only an officer to speak for him, and no right of appeal.

In total the British Army passed roughly 3,000 death sentences, the great majority commuted. In all, 346 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed. Of these, 306 were shot for military offenses, most for desertion, and were granted a posthumous statutory pardon in the Armed Forces Act of 2006; a memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire commemorates them. Most of the rest had been convicted of murder and were not pardoned. Australia, whose government refused to permit it, executed none; Canada shot 25. Germany executed few of its own soldiers, fewer than 50. Italy under General Cadorna was the harshest: about 750 men were executed, and at least one unit, the Catanzaro Brigade, was decimated after a mutiny in May 1916, with one man in ten shot.

France shot roughly 600 men after courts-martial, along with an unknown number of summary executions, especially in 1914–15; these are the fusillés pour l'exemple, "shot as an example". Four corporals of the 336th Infantry Regiment were shot at Souain on 17 March 1915 after a company refused an impossible order; the case was reopened for years by one widow and ended with their rehabilitation in 1934. After the mutinies of 1917 (see chapter VI), over 3,400 men were tried, 554 death sentences passed and somewhere between about 30 and 50 carried out (the exact figure is still debated); General Pétain repaired the army by better leave, better rations and an end to futile attacks. In 1998 prime minister Lionel Jospin urged that the men shot for refusal be brought back into the national memory.

Morale in the trenches was a daily problem for officers and a daily achievement for men. It depended on small things: hot food, dry socks, a letter from home, a few days away from the guns. The armies understood this earlier than their reputations suggest.

Mail. The British Army Postal Service, staffed largely by Royal Engineers, delivered letters to the front within two or three days of posting in England. At its peak it handled some 12 million letters and about a million parcels a week. German Feldpost carried tens of billions of items over the course of the war. A British soldier's letters were censored by his own officers, who spent hours with a blue pencil, but he could also use the "green envelope", which was exempt from the unit censor on the condition that he certified on his honor that it contained nothing but private matters (it was sampled by censors at the base). If he had no time, he could use the Field Service Post Card, a printed form on which he crossed out options: "I am quite well", "I have been admitted into hospital", "I have received no letter from you". Parcels from home brought cake, cigarettes, socks and sweets. Princess Mary's Christmas gift tin of 1914, with its tobacco and cigarettes, was in the end distributed to about 2.5 million soldiers and sailors.

Leave. British soldiers were entitled to short leave, usually around ten days, but its frequency depended on rank and year; many men saw "Blighty" (from the Hindustani vilayati, "foreign" or "European") only once or twice a year, and some of the early volunteers hardly at all. French soldiers had a formal entitlement of about a week every four months from 1915, but the rule was unevenly applied until reforms after the mutinies of 1917, and the long delay was a major grievance. Most rest behind the lines was spent in billets, bath houses, estaminets (where egg and chips and thin beer were the specialty) and, for many, in the brothels of French towns. Venereal disease cost the armies hundreds of thousands of man-days and gave medical officers a moral as well as medical task.

Faith. Chaplains went into the line with the battalions. The Anglican Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, nicknamed "Woodbine Willie" because he handed out cigarettes along with Bibles, won the Military Cross at Messines in 1917. The Jesuit Father William Doyle was killed in August 1917 at Ypres while attending the wounded. At Poperinge, a few miles behind the Ypres salient, the chaplain Philip "Tubby" Clayton opened Talbot House on 11 December 1915, a "club for all ranks" named after a dead officer, Gilbert Talbot; a sign above the door told visitors to leave their rank outside. It had a library, a chapel in the attic, a garden, and a piano, and thousands of soldiers passed through it during the war. Soldiers' private faith, by all accounts, was a mixture of religion, superstition, charms, lucky mascots and fatalism: the legend of the "Angels of Mons" grew from a short story, "The Bowmen", by Arthur Machen, published in a London newspaper on 29 September 1914, and was accepted as fact by many readers.

Humor and the trench press. Black humor was the language of the line. Bruce Bairnsfather's cartoons of "Old Bill", a walrus-mustached veteran, drew a laugh from the men and from a public who bought them by the thousand; his best-known caption, "Well, if you knows of a better 'ole, go to it", appeared in 1915. In February 1916, Captain F. J. Roberts and Lieutenant J. H. Pearson of the 12th Sherwood Foresters, sitting in the ruins of Ypres, found an abandoned printing press, and on 12 February produced the first issue of the Wipers Times: parodies of newspaper advertisements, mock-heroic poems, a jaundiced theater column, and gentle ridicule of the staff. It ran for 23 issues under a changing set of titles, among them the Kemmel Times, the Somme-Times and the B.E.F. Times, until the end of the war. French soldiers printed hundreds of trench journals of their own, among them Le Crapouillot, which survived the war to become a famous satirical magazine. Soldiers sang constantly, from "Tipperary" and "Pack Up Your Troubles" to parodies like "We're Here Because We're Here" (to Auld Lang Syne), and "Mademoiselle from Armentières".

The men in the trenches did not come from a single mold. They were the products of very different systems of recruitment and very different societies, and the armies changed as the war ground on.

Britain: from regulars to volunteers to conscripts. In August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force was a small professional army of regulars and reservists, supplemented from November by the Territorial Force, part-time volunteers who began to arrive in France that autumn. Lord Kitchener's call for 100,000 volunteers on 7 August 1914 brought a flood: on one day in early September more than 30,000 men enlisted. By the end of the year well over a million had joined, and in all roughly 2.5 million men volunteered before conscription began. The new recruits were grouped in Kitchener's "New Armies". Many served in local "Pals" battalions, raised by towns, firms and clubs and promising friends that they could serve together: the Liverpool Pals, the Leeds Pals, the Accrington Pals, the Tyneside Scottish, the Sheffield City Battalion, a Stockbrokers' battalion, a Grimsby "Chums", a Bantam battalion of men under the standard height. The Pals made a fine army and a peculiar tragedy: when a battalion was cut down, as on 1 July 1916, a whole street or workplace lost its young men in an hour. The Military Service Act of January 1916 introduced conscription, first for single men aged 18 to 41 and from May for the married; roughly 2.3 to 2.5 million men were conscripted before the war ended, a little under half of those who served in the army. Australia, by contrast, voted twice, in 1916 and 1917, to reject conscription and fielded a volunteer army throughout; Canada introduced conscription in 1917 amid a crisis over French Canada.

Age and class. The minimum age for service abroad was 19, but many boys lied about their age, and estimates of under-age soldiers run to the hundreds of thousands. The officer corps was drawn heavily from the public schools and universities at the start, and the rapid expansion produced thousands of "temporary gentlemen", young men commissioned for the duration; later in the war a growing share of commissions went to men promoted from the ranks. Officers died in higher proportion than other ranks, roughly one in six against about one in eight overall, because they led from the front. The British working class provided the bulk of the infantry: miners, factory hands, clerks, laborers, farm workers. Some recruits were stunted by poverty, which the army, by feeding them, improved.

The Empire in the trenches. The Indian Corps, with two divisions (Lahore and Meerut), reached Marseilles in September 1914 and fought at Ypres, Neuve Chapelle and Loos through the hardest of winters; its infantry left for other theaters in December 1915, though the cavalry stayed. Wounded Indians were treated at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, which was converted into a hospital. Canada raised an army of more than 400,000 for service overseas; Australia and New Zealand fielded the ANZAC corps; Newfoundland, South Africa and the British West Indies also sent men, although the West Indian soldiers were often confined to labor tasks. The Chinese Labour Corps, about 95,000 strong, dug trenches, laid railways and unloaded ships. France drew over 500,000 men from its empire, notably Algerians and Moroccans and the tirailleurs sénégalais from West Africa; the colonial Moroccan Division was among the most decorated of its army. African American soldiers of the 369th US Infantry, the "Harlem Hellfighters", served in the French line in 1918.

France and Germany. France, with a population smaller than Germany's, mobilized almost everyone. The conscript cohorts were identified by year of birth, the "classe", and by 1916–17 the army was calling up 18- and 19-year-olds. Its infantry was, to a large degree, peasant: farmers from every region who spoke dialects and were fighting for their own soil. Germany conscripted on a similar scale, with Prussia's reserve officer system giving a strong middle-class officer corps. The war aged every army and removed the best.

The "trench war" is shorthand for the Western Front, but there were many different trench wars, and the environment shaped each one.

The Eastern Front. The distances were enormous: the front ran for over 1,000 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and the density of troops was far lower than in the west, so lines were thinner and less continuous. In 1914 and 1915 the war was largely one of movement (the Russian "Great Retreat" of 1915 is the most famous example), and cavalry remained useful. Fortresses such as Przemyśl and Novogeorgievsk played an outsized role. Trenches did appear, and from late 1915 sectors like Riga and the Narocz lakes settled into positional warfare, but the Russian army was handicapped by its shortage of shells, rifles and barbed wire. The Brusilov offensive of June 1916 (see chapter V) showed that a line could be broken without a weeks-long bombardment, by a short, intense preparation and attacks on many points at once. After the revolution of 1917, front-line soldiers on the Eastern Front began to fraternize in great numbers, to the alarm of both high commands. Epidemic disease was a menace everywhere; a typhus outbreak in Serbia in the winter of 1914–15 killed many tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians.

The Italian front: a war on the glaciers. When Italy entered the war in May 1915 its front with Austria-Hungary ran for some 600 kilometers from the Stelvio region, where soldiers fought at over 3,000 meters, past the Dolomites to the Adriatic. In the mountains, men lived in rock shelters, hauled artillery up cliffs with ropes and cable cars, and tunneled into glaciers: the Austrians dug an "ice city" of barracks and galleries under the Marmolada. Cold, avalanches and altitude killed as surely as bullets: on 13 December 1916, "White Friday", avalanches on the Dolomite front killed an estimated 2,000 to 10,000 soldiers on the two sides, though sources vary widely. On the Carso plateau near the Isonzo (see chapter IV), the fighting was more like the west, but the rocky karst made digging nearly impossible and soldiers piled stones for cover; shells produced showers of stone splinters that added greatly to the casualties. The Italian general Luigi Cadorna led with an iron hand, imposing a discipline of terror.

Salonika. In October 1915 French and British troops landed at Salonika (Thessaloniki) in neutral Greece, to support Serbia, and stayed to hold a front in Macedonia that eventually extended from the Aegean to the Albanian mountains. Facing the Bulgarians across rugged hills and malarial river valleys, the Allied army of several hundred thousand men dug in around the city, behind a perimeter of wire known as the "Birdcage", so that critics derided the army as "the gardeners of Salonika", a jibe attributed to Georges Clemenceau. The enemy there was disease: malaria put more men into hospital than fighting did, by a wide margin. Yet this was no sideshow in the end. When the Allies attacked at Dobro Pole on 15 September 1918, the front collapsed and Bulgaria sued for an armistice on 29 September.

The desert fronts. In Sinai and Palestine the main enemy was thirst. The British defended the Suez Canal in 1915 and advanced into Sinai in 1916–17 behind a railway and a water pipeline from Egypt; armies could go only as far as water could be carried. At Gaza the Turkish lines were a chain of redoubts and trenches that held twice in the spring of 1917; the third battle was won by a wide flank march to Beersheba, where, on 31 October 1917, Australian light horsemen charged the trenches at the gallop and took the wells. In Mesopotamia, summer temperatures climbed above 50 degrees Celsius, flies and dysentery were rife, and the evacuation of the wounded was so poor that a parliamentary commission in 1917 condemned it. At Gallipoli, the Anzac trenches were so close to the Turkish lines that grenades and bombs were hurled back and forth; flies and dysentery added to the misery.

Taken together, these other theaters show what the western trench was not: a universal condition. It was the product of dense armies, abundant artillery, short fronts and abundant wire. Where any of these was missing, the war looked different, and sometimes more mobile.