Life in the trenches

Trench Warfare

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWtrench.htm

At dusk, we set off on the last leg of the journey to the Ypres sector, and real war. Surely nothing could be more miserable or depressing than that journey up to the line. There was no real front line, trenches could not be dug in mud. The Belgians had broken their canal banks to hold up the German advance but of course it worked both ways.

The mud was so deep that if a man slipped off the 18-inch wide duckboards, which had mostly been blown away by shellfire anyway, he would sink as if in sinking sand and often was lost for good. A white tape had originally been put down as a guide to our sector, but that soon disappeared into the mud and it was too easy to get lost if one slipped, as the single column must keep moving.

I slipped and managed to struggle out but the column of men had gone and in the dark I seemed to be alone. Was I scared? I certainly was.
George Parker - The Tale of the Boy Soldier

Eventually we arrived at a town in Belgium, Poperinghe, and from there marched to a village called Ouderdom. This was the headquarters of an entrenching battalion and we learned that we were to stop there for a while until the regiment, that had been badly cut up on the Somme, was ready to receive us.

While there we had to go out at night and dig communication trenches. It was hard work and I found it difficult to keep awake all through the night. In the grey of the morning we fell in and marched back to Ouderdom a few miles away.

During those first few days I saw my first dead men. We had to put our spades and picks into a lorry that took them away, and lying on the floor were two dead British soldiers.
Jack Cummins - The Landlord Cometh

The Suffolks were sent to France and landed at Calais. I immediately managed to catch trench fever and spent three weeks in a field hospital at Etaples. I asked for permission to go up to the line to rejoin my regiment. Unfortunately I never caught them up and I was placed with the London 60th Rifle Brigade and stayed with them until I was discharged.

I was in France for twelve months and caught trench fever again, when I was in Belgium. This time I was in the field hospital and all the other patients were German. I celebrated my twenty first birthday in that ward and Matron made me a cake. I think she liked me, because she asked me to go and work for her after the war, but I said that I had my own plans.
I was used as a runner between the lines and the base. We spent one week in the trenches with no change of clothes and very little to eat and then we would be relieved and go back to camp to wash, rest and be fed. Once we were playing marbles in the trenches and a friend jumped up and was shot straight through the head, it was awful.
Albert Goble in Blighty Brighton

"I remember sitting in the trenches one night at Christmas time when I was a drum major in the Royal Fusiliers. I was sitting in the dug-out and it was raining hard. When it came to stand-to, at dawn, our feet were stuck in the mud. And there was a chap - an old London totter I s'pose he was - and he says, "I dunno 'Arry, whatever we done to deserve this? There's the aristocrats at home, their feet under nice tables. And there's all this shot and shell, and here we all are smothered in mud.''"
Who was Harry Cowley?