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From above, the trenches looked almost beautiful.
The Great War was the first in which the combatants used airplanes. Though these nascent air forces did conduct some bombing, their primary job was to look down on the battlefield, taking photographs of enemy positions and giving commanders a sense of the flow of battle.
These aerial photographers captured the most distinctive feature of the war — trench lines, snaking out across the landscape in a complex pattern of interlocking lines. If you didn’t know better, you might think that they were meandering creeks.
Here’s a captivating example of one of those aerial photos, taken after the armistice in 1918:
And another, taken in France during the war. You can see the trenches in the upper left-hand corner, with their telltale zig-zag pattern (designed to prevent enemy soldiers from entering the trench and then firing down its length):
Occasionally, these aerial photos would betray the violence happening below; this one shows the Lochnagar crater, created when British engineers dug under German positions and detonated explosives underground:
The armies’ maps make the trenches look even more orderly; you can see them on a Scottish map of trenches in France below, moving from north to south in blue:
And this one shows them in red on battlefield of Messines, where 700 New Zealanders died in 1917:
But as anyone who understands anything about World War I knows, the trenches weren’t beautiful. They were places of chaos, boredom, horror, and sadness. They were also, often, the main thing keeping soldiers alive.
Trenches didn’t appear on the landscape magically; they had to be dug. And, before they headed off to the front, soldiers had to learn to dig trenches properly. In Maryland, before heading off to war, American soldiers carefully measured out their practice trenches:
And on the campus of Princeton University, aspiring officers got their hands dirty:
Here, New Zealand troops dig on a battlefield in France. It looks like hard work, but far preferable to combat, I’m sure:
A trench is a simple thing, a ditch that soldiers can stand in so they’re harder to kill. But trenches in the Great War took all kinds of forms. Some trenches were real feats of engineering. As soldiers occupied them for months or even years, they built them up, making them more resilient and as pleasant a “home” as possible.
These trenches in Belgium look orderly and well-constructed:
And these German soldiers seem incredibly well-protected:
Some trench networks were so complex that they had signage so that soldiers could find their way:
Sometimes, soldiers added their own signage. Here, the New Zealand Army posted an official “Keep to the Trench” sign. The soldiers added “and you’ll get to NZ.” They also labeled their supply depot “The Cannibals Paradise Supply Den,” a reference to the apparent belief that German troops held that New Zealand soldiers ate human flesh:
Other trenches, though, seem much rougher. This one in France must have been claustrophobic:
And many of them, like this trench at the Somme, were nothing more than a ditch in the mud:
Soldiers had to do pretty much everything in the trenches. They fought, of course, but they also had to tend to the wounded there:
During periods of relative calm, they wasted time and slept:
The Red Cross would show up sometimes and hand out presents, as they did in this Italian trench on New Year’s Day, 1918:
Once, famous filmmaker D.W. Griffith even showed up to make a propaganda film called Hearts of the World (he’s the guy wearing a bowtie):
One thing you notice if you look at a lot of these photos is just how bleak the landscape is. There seems to be little left of nature — all of the plants and animals have been blasted away, leaving only a world of mud and snapped-off trees:
Trench warfare took place not just in the muddy fields of France but in more extreme environments. Here, soldiers look out from their position in the Sinai Desert:
And here, Italian soldiers dig in on the summit of an Alpine mountain:
The trenches were, as anybody who’s learned about them knows, awful. They filled with water, which bred mosquitoes in warm weather and froze in the cold. They harbored rats, mice, lice, and all sorts of other vermin. People bled and died there. Many soldiers lost their minds as well, suffering from what we’d now call PTSD.
Though the environment of the trenches is interesting, the people are more so. I especially like the trench photographs that show the soldiers’ faces clearly. I wonder what these Australian soldiers’ experiences must have been like, caught up in an apocalypse halfway around the world from their homes:
Or these British soldiers, looking out on the world through a tiny periscope:
Conrad Aiken’s poem “1915: The Trenches” captures the helplessness of the men in the trenches:
All night long we lie
Stupidly watching the smoke puff over the sky,
Stupidly watching the interminable stars
Come out again, peaceful and cold and high,
Swim into the smoke again, or melt in a flare of red…
All night long, all night long,
Hearing the terrible battle of guns,
We smoke our pipes, we think we shall soon be dead,
We sleep for a second, and wake again,
We dream we are filling pans and baking bread,
Or hoeing the witch-grass out of the wheat,
We dream we are turning lathes,
Or open our shops, in the early morning,
And look for a moment along the quiet street…
And we do not laugh, though it is strange
In a harrowing second of time
To traverse so many worlds, so many ages,
And come to this chaos again,
This vast symphonic dance of death,
This incoherent dust.
But I suppose we should remember that this subterranean world of terror and boredom was infinitely preferable to the alternative — having to go “over the top.”
I’d imagine that climbing out of them in the face of enemy fire was one of the few things that made the trenches seem like a good place to be.
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Remarkable piece of work. You’ve made the trenches real and horrible. How did anyone come out of this and live a normal life. I imagine they couldn’t do it.
Such a moving, evocative tribute to these soldiers. Thanks.