Sky Above, Mud Below
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By Anthony Brandt
2/23/2017 • Military History
German troops in France in 1916 advance from support and communications trenches established just behind the front lines.Among the most enduring images of World War I are those vast expanses of mazelike trench lines—miles of zigzagging, sandbagged excavations fronted by complex barbed-wire entanglements and dotted by massive, artillery-proof command shelters. Over the intervening decades films such as Paths of Glory and All Quiet on the Western Front have accustomed audiences to scenes of soldiers mounting sturdy firing steps shoulder to shoulder before clambering “over the top” and charging off toward the enemy.
While such images are accurate—earthworks on either side of the lines in Europe did ultimately become intricate and extensive—they do not present a full and faithful picture of how trenches originated in the early months of the war or of just how miserable life could be in even the best-engineered systems.
For such details we must turn to the accounts of those who were there.
French poilu Louis Barthas left a stark record of conditions in the Western Front trenches. (Wikimedia Commons)
Louis Barthas, a barrel maker from the small wine-making town of Peyriac-Minervois in the south of France, arrived in the trenches on the evening of Nov. 12, 1914. He had never seen combat and later recalled running in terror across several hundred yards of open ground exposed to German gunfire and tumbling into a frontline trench. It was, he recalled, “a wide, shallow stream at the bottom. No protective barbed wire. No parapets, no loopholes. No trace of a shelter for us. And yet this trench, so poorly equipped, which would have made the Romans of Julius Caesar smile with pity, seemed to us a precious refuge.”
http://www.historynet.com/sky-above-mud-below.htm
