Life in the trenches was an awful experience for the soldiers. These young men that were taken from their houses and families and were forced to fight in the war. It is very impossible to even start to imagine how homesick and frightened they were in the trenches.
These soldiers were living in fear everyday they lived in those trenches think that they were going to die. There was many corpses were just lying in the trenches, not even buried. This would have been very upsetting and hard to deal with for them. Many men developed trench fever and could not deal with it well and would continue to shake. Nowadays people call it “shell shock”. Even if the men tried to run away, they would be shot dead. There was no way out for these soldiers.
Some may think that was the worst of all, but that was only the beginning. The smell in the trenches was horrendous. It was absolutely horrible! It was a mixture of latrine, mud, rotting sand bags, stale human sweat and corpses. Not only that there was many, many rats running around the trenches were the soldiers slept! At night these rats would crawl all over the sleeping bodies and faces of the soldiers. Also their clothes were full of lice, making them itchy all over and only having a bath once a month did this as well.
The trenches were about seven feet deep, and in the front of the trenches there was barbed wire, up to 15 meters thick. This was an area that was being fought over, called “no man’s land”. The trenches of the enemy would be as much as 800 meters apart. In a few places they were only 20 meters apart! So every night they would have soldiers out looking at the enemy to find out what they were planning or doing.
In world war one these soldiers were fighting for the enemies trenches, but it wasn’t easy because they were so well defended. The average soldiers would be caring a bayonet and a rife that fired 25 rounds a minute. However, these guns were no matches for the machine guns, which fired...