Joshua Levine

That made perfect sense.

It wasn't just the frontline trench, but certainly the frontline trench had to be like that.

So it was miserable inside, but it also had that level of protection, particularly against artillery shells.

Now, people coming into a trench for the first time were in quite a lot of danger because they didn't know how to live in it.

And the first thing you do always was to keep your head down because the trenches were at variable heights.

You know, they weren't all built to a specification.

You know, these weren't IKEA trenches that were just placed there.

They had to be built and they had to be built given whatever was there, the geography and the conditions at the time.

So people arriving in would either be sort of lackadaisical and wouldn't know to get their heads down.

You only had to pop your head up for a second and the sniper would take your head off.

or they would throw themselves down at the slightest noise.

And in fact, something that the frontline officers liked to do was when you had a staff officer coming up from behind, they enjoyed it when the staff officer came up and was so scared that they threw themselves down at every, that constant sort of competition and rivalry and sort of antipathy between the staff officer and the frontline officer, that was very much at play.

But so there was a great danger.

And, you know, snipers were a great danger.

So people, not only did they have to keep their heads down, not only were the signs up, you know, reminding people to keep their heads down, people, you know, they had different ways.

you know, war being the mother of invention.

I read about one man, we used to be able to isolate snipers.

What we used to try to do, we'd put a turnip on the parapet and then the sniper hopefully would fire and fire through it and you could see the direction that they're coming.

Then you'd put another turnip up at a different point and you'd fire through that and you'd be able to work out precisely.

I mean, I'm not sure how successful that was, but you know, it's what we used to do.