Trench Warfare
The Horrors of War
- Trenches were dug as a means to provide protection from the enemy
- Soldiers who fought on the Western Front and in trenches were forced to live among the dead and decaying bodies of their allies and enemies
- Threats such as "Shelling, sniper fire, machine guns, and poison gas" (Lyons, 2000) were ever present.
Despite the horrors of the trenches, the realities of modern warfare made it near impossible for soldiers to escape. With the barest of supplies and ammunition around them, soldiers were left to stare at the sky above them, and try to hold their breath so as not to smell the rotting flesh of the dead around them. Not only did they face these horrors inside the trenches, but the vast desolation of the Western Front made it easy to forget that an enemy lay on the side side, even if they were invisible. One of the few times a soldier would leave his trench would be for a raid on enemy encampments and night patrols with the briefest of rests between. Despite the annual eight-day leave soldiers were given, the realities of war-- especially on the front-- were often too much for civilians back home to understand or deal with. Once of those awful things soldiers were forced to deal with was shelling, which often would cause trenches to collapse on the people inside of them. The term "shell shock" derives from these events as Soliders would often have to literally claw their way out of the trench.
References
- Lyons, M. J. (2000). World War I. A Short History (2nd ed.). Pearson Education. Retrieved November 7, 2016
Credit: Christina