Life in a trench, I'd like to explain in one word, horrific. It's mud, it's death, it's rats, it's stench. And soldiers develop an attitude in a trench that everybody is going to die.
Life in the trench... was abysmal. There were several lines of trenches and the front line trenches of course were the most dangerous because they were constantly under fire. The Germans dug assiduously building dry, safe and comfortable trenches for themselves with bunkers that actually had electricity and sometimes running water.
The British and French who were convinced that they were never going to be there for that long. Didn't spend nearly the same effort, and so their trenches tended to be muddy and wet and not that safe. Disease ran rampant.
It was very difficult to get any sort of sleep, a decent hot meal, keep your clothes dry, and more importantly, to keep your sanity. There were so many health problems of just simple disease that took much more men out of combat than direct fire. I think one word that would surprise people about life in a trench?
Boredom. A lot of time is spent just sitting, cleaning tools, and being scared to death that battle's going to start any minute. It was just the day-to-day monotony of being trapped in this very small space and fighting for a war that's really fought in inches. The idea of open warfare, of...
Fighting out into what they called no man's land wasn't working. The technology of the war had advanced so much with machine guns, artillery that could lob shells a mile. It became mostly a defensive war early on, and as a defensive war, you wanted to protect your troops, so the miles and miles of trenches were built. There were often bodies buried in the sides of trenches, bodies lying out in the open in front of the trenches. The soldiers were experiencing not only the war that they were fighting at the moment, but the war that had been going on throughout those trenches for all of the years of the war.
A young lieutenant writes his mother and says, I haven't been killed yet, but it's only a matter of time. That's typical of the way soldiers felt about life in the trench. You just did it.
You existed day to day, tried to go on, keep your chin up. One day, the bullet was going to have your name on it, and you were going to perish. You weren't going home.