Trench Warfare
Everyday life in the trenches.
The dangers of life in the trenches:
Snipers (marksmen armed with rifles with telescopicsights) were also
posted along the front line. Lulled by the quietness, someone would be
foolishand carelessly linger with his head above the top of the parapet.
Then, like a puppet whose strings have suddenly snapped, he crashes to
the bottom of the trench. There is no gradual failing over, but instant
collapse.
A jerry sniper, with a telescopic sighted rifle nicely positioned behind
the aperture of an armoured plate, has lain patiently, for hours perhaps,
watching our parapet for the slightest movement.
A sniper was an enemy soldier who specialised in shooting people when they accidentally showed themselves.
They knew that many of those who left the trenches in an attack would be killed or wounded. They had to live with the sights and sounds of death: 9th June Going along whistling I saw a group of men bending over a man bring in the bottom of a trench. He was making a snoring noise mixed with animal groans. By his feet lay his cap splashed with his brains. One can joke with a wounded man, one can disregard a dead man, but no one can joke over a man who takes three hours to die after the top of his head has been taken qf by a bullet fired at twenty yards range.
Robert Graves,
A poem 'Breakfast' by Wilfred Gibson:
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs
Because the shells were screeching overhead..
I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread
That Hull United would beat Halifax
When Jimmy Stainthorpe played full-back instead of Billy Bradford.
Ginger raised his head
And cursed, and took the bet, and dropt back dead.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
The story of Bill Beckington
We hadnt been in the line long, first time up on our own really - August 1915 it was. Bill Beckington and me, a pal of mine from Chislehurst, we were to go up and repair a trench. A shell had made a hole in the front of this trench, all blown down it was Well, we got there and we got some sandbags. "I'll go up and you fill the bags and hand them to me". said Bill
But as soon as he went up there was a crack and something went past. A sniper!. I was just about to say "Look out Bill, I think he's got you spotted when there was another shot and Bill was hit in the head. I can still see it now, bits of his brains on my tunic there was - like fishes roe. He couldn’t have known what hit him.
He was the first get it in our Company. They should have told
him to keep down - we were new, we didn't know. We carried
him back, not far, and I remember we buried him in the evening.
I was lucky, if I'd gone up and filled the sandbags, it would have
been me that was hit. That’s the the sort of thing you think
about afterwards really. Poor Bill - they should have told him.
Trench Mortars
Trench mortars were also used in the front line trenches (the German mortars were called minenwerfer - mine throwers). They were short-barrelled guns which shot steel drums, packed with high explosive and scrap iron, into the enemy's front lines.
George Coppard describes the effects of these mortars or 'minnies'.
There were latrines (lavatories) at intervals along the front line, generally holes cut in the back of the trenches. 'The sites were shifted when necessary as jerry [German] snipers watched them very closely for the careless. Many a poor Tommy met his end latrine sap'.
A weary Tommy would scratch a hole in the side of the bottom of a trench to get out of the way of trampling feet. A minnie would explode, and the earth above him would quietly subside on him. Even if the exact spot was known, what was the good of digging him out? In one stroke he was dead and buried.
Gas
Every hundred metres or so along the front line was a gas alarm station
or 'Gas Post'. This was usually an empty brass cartridge case from
an artillery shell hanging from a piece of rope. When the enemy fired
poison gas shells, the sentry on gas duty would beat his gong (the cartridge
case) to warn the men to put on gas masks.