FOOD
Life in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I (1914 – 1918)
A selection of diary accounts form soldiers who were there.
(1) In a letter to his parents, Private Pressey of the Royal Artillery described the quality of the food men were receiving on the Western Front.
The biscuits are so hard that you had to put them on a firm surface and smash them with a stone or something. I've held one in my hand and hit the sharp corner of a brick wall and only hurt my hand. Sometimes we soaked the smashed fragments in water for several days. Then we would heat and drain, pour condensed milk over a dishful of the stuff and get it down.
(2) Richard Beasley was interviewed in 1993 about his experiences during the First World War.
In training the food was just about eatable but in France we were starving. All we lived on was tea and dog biscuits. If we got meat once a week we were lucky, but imagine trying to eat standing in a trench full of water with the smell of dead bodies nearby.
(3) Major Graham wrote a letter to his family about the food supplied to soldiers on the Western Front.
I am sorry you should have the wrong impression about the food; we always had more than enough, both to eat and drink. I give you a day's menu at random: Breakfast - bacon and tomatoes, bread, jam, and cocoa. Lunch - shepherd's pie, potted meat, potatoes, bread and jam. Tea - bread and jam. Supper - ox-tail soup, roast beef, whisky and soda, leeks, rice pudding, coffee. We have provided stores of groceries and Harrods have been ordered to send us out a weekly parcel. However, if you like to send us an occasional luxury it would be very welcome.
(4) Private Harold Horne, Northumberland Fusiliers, interviewed 1978.
Ration parties from each company in the line went to carry back the rations which were tied in sandbags and consisted, usually, of bread, hard biscuits, tinned meat (bully) in 12 oz. tins, tinned jam, tinned butter, sugar and tea, pork and beans (baked beans with a piece of pork fat on top), cigarettes and tobacco. Sometimes we got Manconochie Rations. This was a sort of Irish stew in tins which could be quickly heated over a charcoal brazier. When it was possible to have a cookhouse within easy reach of trenches, fresh meat, bacon, vegetables, flour, etc. would be sent up and the cooks could produce reasonably good meals. Food and tea was sent along in 'dixies' (large iron containers the lid of which could be used as a frying pan).
Lice
Life in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I (1914 – 1918)
A selection of diary accounts form soldiers who were there.
(1) Henry Gregory of 119th Machine Gun Company was interviewed after the war about life in the trenches.
When we arrived in the trenches we got a shock when the other soldiers in the hut took their shirts off after tea. They were catching lice. We had never seen a louse before, but they were here in droves. The men were killing them between their nails. When they saw us looking at this performance with astonishment, one of the men remarked, 'You will soon be as lousy as we are chum!' They spent the better part of an hour in killing lice and scratching themselves. We soon found out that this took the better part of an hour daily. Each day brought a new batch; as fast as you killed them, others took their place.
One night, as we lay in bed after doing our two hours' sentry - we did two hours on and two hours off - my friend Jock said 'damn this, I cannot stand it any longer!' He took off his tunic - we slept in these - then he took off his jersey, then his shirt. He put his shirt in the middle of the dug-out floor and put his jersey and tunic on again. As we sat up in bed watching the shirt he had taken off and put it on the floor it actually lifted; it was swarming with lice.
(2) Private Stuart Dolden wrote about his experiences in the trenches after the war.
We had to sleep fully dressed, of course, this was very uncomfortable with the pressure of ammunition on one's chest restricted breathing; furthermore, when a little warmth was obtained the vermin used to get busy, and for some unexplained reason they always seemed to get lively in the portion of one's back, that lay underneath the belt and was the most inaccessible spot. The only way to obtain relief was to get out of the dugout, put a rifle barrel between the belt and rub up and down like a donkey at a gatepost. This stopped it for a bit, but as soon as one got back into the dugout, and was getting reasonably warm so would the little brutes get going again.
(3) Private George Coppard, With A Machine Gun to Cambrai (1969)
A full day's rest allowed us to clean up a bit, and to launch a full scale attack on lice. I sat in a quiet corner of a barn for two hours delousing myself as best I could. We were all at it, for none of us escaped their vile attentions. The things lay in the seams of trousers, in the deep furrows of long thick woolly pants, and seemed impregnable in their deep entrenchments. A lighted candle applied where they were thickest made them pop like Chinese crackers. After a session of this, my face would be covered with small blood spots from extra big fellows which had popped too vigorously. Lice hunting was called 'chatting'. In parcels from home it was usual to receive a tin of supposedly death-dealing powder or pomade, but the lice thrived on the stuff.
Trench Foot
Life in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I (1914 – 1918)
A selection of diary accounts form soldiers who were there.
(1) After the war, Captain G. H. Impey, 7th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, wrote about his experiences of trench life.
The trenches were wet and cold and at this time some of them did not have duckboards and dug-outs. The battalion lived in mud and water. Altogether about 200 men were evacuated for trench feet and rheumatism. Gum boots were provided for the troops in the most exposed positions. Trench feet was still a new ailment and the provision of dry socks was vitally important. Part of the trench was reserved for men to go two at a time, at least once a day, and rub each other's feet with grease.
(2) Sergeant Harry Roberts, Lancashire Fusiliers, interviewed after the war.
If you have never had trench feet described to you. I will tell you. Your feet swell to two or three times their normal size and go completely dead. You could stick a bayonet into them and not feel a thing. If you are fortunate enough not to lose your feet and the swelling begins to go down. It is then that the intolerable, indescribable agony begins. I have heard men cry and even scream with the pain and many had to have their feet and legs amputated.
(3) At the age of 92, Arthur Savage was asked about his memories of life on the Western Front.
My memories are of sheer terror and the horror of seeing men sobbing because they had trench foot that had turned gangrenous. They knew they were going to lose a leg. Memories of lice in your clothing driving you crazy. Filth and lack of privacy. Of huge rats that showed no fear of you as they stole your food rations. And cold deep wet mud everywhere. And of course, corpses. I'd never seen a dead body before I went to war. But in the trenches the dead are lying all around you. You could be talking to the fellow next to you when suddenly he'd be hit by a sniper and fall dead beside you. And there he's stay for days.
A photograph of the feet of a British soldier suffering from Trench Foot.
Rats
Life in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I (1914 – 1918)
A selection of diary accounts form soldiers who were there.
(1) After the war Stuart Dolden wrote an account of life in the trenches.
The outstanding feature of the trenches was the extraordinary number of rats. The area was infested with them. It was impossible to keep them out of the dugouts. They grew fat on the food that they pilfered from us, and anything they could pick up in or around the trenches; they were bloated and loathsome to look at. Some were nearly as big as cats. We were filled with an instinctive hatred of them, because however one tried to put the thought of one's mind, one could not help feeling that they fed on the dead.
(2) Soon after arriving at the Western Front, the journalist, C. E. Montague wrote to his friend Francis Dodd (30th December, 1915)
The one thing of which no description given in England any true measure is the universal, ubiquitous muckiness of the whole front. One could hardly have imagined anybody as muddy as everybody is. The rats are pretty well unimaginable too, and, wherever you are, if you have any grub about you that they like, they eat straight through your clothes or haversack to get at it as soon as you are asleep. I had some crumbs of army biscuit in a little calico bag in a greatcoat pocket, and when I awoke they had eaten a big hole through the coat from outside and pulled the bag through it, as if they thought the bag would be useful to carry away the stuff in. But they don't actually try to eat live humans.
(3) Private George Coppard, With A Machine Gun to Cambrai (1969)
Rats bred by the tens of thousands and lived on the fat of the land. When we were sleeping in funk holes the things ran over us, played about, copulated and fouled our scraps of food, their young squeaking incessantly. There was no proper system of waste disposal in trench life. Empty tins of all kinds were flung away over the top on both sides of the trench. Millions of tins were thus available for all the rats in France and Belgium in hundreds of miles of trenches. During brief moments of quiet at night, one could hear a continuous rattle of tins moving against each other. The rats were turning them over. What happened to the rats under heavy shell-fire was a mystery, but their powers of survival kept place with each new weapon, including poison gas.
(4) Private Frank Bass, letter (1916)
In one of the dug-outs the other night, two men were smoking by the light of the candle, very quiet. All at once the candle moved and flickered. Looking up they saw a rat was dragging it away. Another day I saw a rat washing itself like a cat behind the candle. Some as big as rabbits. I was in the trench the other night and one jumped over the parapet.
(5) Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929)
Rats came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company and, in token of welcome, was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned in that night he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.
Trench
Life in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I (1914 – 1918)
A selection of diary accounts form soldiers who were there.
(1) Captain Impey of the Royal Sussex Regiment wrote this account in 1915.
The trenches were wet and cold and at this time some of them did not have duckboards or dug-outs. The battalion lived in mud and water.
(2) Private Livesay, letter to parents living in East Grinstead (6th March, 1915)
Our trenches are... ankle deep mud. In some places trenches are waist deep in water. Time is spent digging, filling sandbags, building up parapets, fetching stores, etc. One does not have time to be weary.
(3) Private Pollard wrote about trench life in his memoirs published in 1932.
The trench, when we reached it, was half full of mud and water. We set to work to try and drain it. Our efforts were hampered by the fact that the French, who had first occupied it, had buried their dead in the bottom and sides. Every stroke of the pick encountered a body. The smell was awful.
(4) J. B. Priestley, letter to his father, Jonathan Priestley (December, 1915)
The communication trenches are simply canals, up to the waist in some parts, the rest up to the knees. There are only a few dug-outs and those are full of water or falling in. Three men were killed this way from falling dug-outs. I haven't had a wash since we came into these trenches and we are all mud from head to foot.
(5) Captain Lionel Crouch wrote to his wife about life in the trenches in 1917.
Last night we had the worst time we've had since we've been out. A terrific thunderstorm broke out. Rain poured in torrents, and the trenches were rivers, up to one's knees in places and higher if one fell into a sump. One chap fell in one above his waist! It was pitch dark and all was murky in the extreme. Bits of the trench fell in. The rifles all got choked with mud, through men falling down.
Daily Life
Life in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I (1914 – 1918)
The opposing armies faced each other across the desolate, deserted and dangerous wastes of No Man's Land. The front lines consisted of a warren of communication trenches, support trenches, advanced trenches and observation posts, in which men faced appalling conditions surrounded by dirt, disease and death. The war veteran and writer Robert Graves said of the Western Front that it was "known among its embittered inhabitants as the Sausage Machine, because it was fed with live men, churned out corpses, and remained firmly screwed in place." For the Canadians the front line advanced only one mile in two years, and casualty figures for the British forces as a whole (including Canadian) were incredibly high. Over the course of the war on the Western Front, 118,941 officers and 2,571,113 men became casualties: a quarter of these were killed. On July 1, 1916 alone, the British lost nearly 58,000 men. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment attacked at Beaumont-Hamel on that day and suffered 91 percent casualties: of the 801 who went into the attack 684 were killed or wounded in 40 minutes.
In the winter the ground was frozen under a layer of snow and ice: men had extreme cold to add to their fear and their hunger, the noise of artillery bombardments and the stench in which they lived constantly. When spring came so did the rain, and the trenches and No Man's Land turned into a quagmire. In this vast sea of mud, men could - and did - drown, especially if they were wounded. Movement became almost impossible, and troops lived continually in water, which even in the better trenches could average a depth of two feet. Many thousands of men as a result suffered from trench foot, which if not treated could lead to amputation. Always there were the millions of rats, the lice, the flies and disease. Robert Graves said after the war: "The familiar trench smell still haunts my nostrils: compounded of stagnant mud, latrine buckets, chloride of lime, unburied or half-buried corpses, rotting sandbags, stale human sweat, fumes of cordite... Rats became a menace almost as unnerving as the enemy... They fed on unburied corpses that surrounded us and sometimes filled the trenches." George Coppard, who served as a machine gunner, described how heavy shelling would "churn up the dead in bits and pieces. Every square yard of ground seemed to be layered with corpses at varying depths, producing a sickening stench." This stench could be smelled several miles away. It is not surprising that so many of the dead have no known grave - more than 70,000 from the British Empire alone.
Lice caused continual itching and discomfort. Breeding in the warmth of underclothing, they plagued the men and no delousing methods proved effective. They also bred disease, as did the millions of flies that swarmed around the living and the dead alike. Official statistics show how more than three and a half million men succumbed to illness because of the terrible conditions in the trenches.
In this world of stealth and strange sounds, millions of men tried to survive trench life. They faced the continual danger of artillery bombardment, snipers, trench raids and going "over the top" to attack the enemy. Often they would not see the enemy for weeks at a time, although he was close by, trying to survive just as they were. They felt isolated from the real world, Canadian and German alike, and in their unreal world they came to have little in common with civilians back home, for whom they often developed feelings of contempt.