Posts
Paul Fussell, “The
Great War and Modern Memory”
Fussell has written a wonderful book regarding the First
World War; in it, he does not cover in detail the strategies, the politics, or
the battles; instead, he focuses on the people and the literature – the
literature that came before, during, and after the war, thus shaping the road
to it and our remembrance of it.
In this post I will focus on his description of trench life:
the geography, the glorified tale, and the reality.
The Geography
From the North Sea coast of Belgium
the line wandered southward, bulging out to contain Ypres, then dropping down
to protect Béthune, Arras, and Albert.
It continued south in front of Montidier, Compiègne, Soissons, Reims,
Verdun, St. Mihiel, and Nancy, and finally attached its southernmost end to the
Swiss border at Beurnevisin, in Alsace.
The top forty miles – the part north of Ypres – was held by the
Belgians; the next ninety miles, down to the river Ancre, were British; the
French held the rest, to the south.
The line ran about 400 miles; yet there were about 25,000
miles of trenches, counting those of the Central Powers – enough to circle the
globe. There were normally three lines
of trenches: the front line or firing line, from 50 yards to one mile from the
enemy; behind it, the support line; behind this was the reserve line.
A firing trench was supposed to be
six to eight feet deep and four or five feet wide. On the enemy side a parapet of earth or
sandbags rose about two or three feet above the ground.
Many dugouts, no straight-line trenches (a zig-zag every few
yards), sumps for the water (rarely sufficient or effective), crumbling walls
supported by sandbags, corrugated iron, or branches. Barbed wire out in front – far enough away to
keep the enemy from hand-grenade distance.
Each section had a staging town: for example, for Ypres it
was Poperinghe; for the Somme, Amiens.
The trench was not far from home…
…what makes experience in the Great
War unique and gives it a special freight of irony is the ridiculous proximity
of the trenches to home. Just seventy
miles from “this stinking world of sticky tricking earth” was the rich plush of
London theater seats and the perfume, alcohol and cigar smoke of the Café Royal.
An officer heading out on leave could have breakfast in the trench
and dinner in his London club the same evening.
The Glorified Tale
Exhibitions of trenches were presented in Kensington Garden
for the home-town folks: “These were clean, dry, and well furnished, with
straight sides and sandbags neatly aligned.”
R.E. Vernede writes his wife from
the real trenches that a friend of his has just returned from viewing a set of
ideal ones. He “found he had never seen
anything at all like it before.” And
Wilfred Owen calls the Kensington Gardens trenches “the laughing stock of the
army.”
The Reality
The British trenches were wet,
cold, smelly, and thoroughly squalid.
Compared with the precise and thorough German works, they were decidedly
amateur, reflecting a complacency about the British genius for improvisation.
The men were not the only living beings in the trenches; lice
and rats were constant companions. The lice
fed on the living and the rats fed on the dead.
Dead horses and dead men – and parts
of both – were sometimes not buried for months…. You could smell the front line
miles before you could see it.
Bodies and parts of bodies would often become part of the
trench wall.
…in the trenches there was very
seldom any fresh meat, not for eating, anyway…
The futility was overwhelming.
In the three lines of trenches the
main business of the soldier was to exercise self-control while being
shelled.
…even in the quietest times, some
7000 British men and officers were killed and wounded daily, just as a matter
of course. “Wastage,” the Staff called
it.
Life in the trench was both literally and figuratively not far
removed from the grave.
One saw two things only: the walls
of an unlocalized, undifferentiated earth and the sky above....It was the sight
of the sky, almost alone, that had the power to persuade a man that he was not
already lost in a common grave.
By the end of 1916, the possibility that the war might be
endless “began to tease the mind.” One
officer calculated that the British would reach the Rhine in 180 years, given
the rate of advance to date.
“We held two irreconcilable
beliefs: that the war would never end and that we would win it.”
The war didn’t end – not for another 30 years; and it is not
appropriate to consider that Britain won much of anything.
