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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Life in the trenches of World War I wasn't just about facing the enemy, it was about surviving all sorts of other things. The filth, the disease, the frostbite, the psychological challenge. Imagine mud stretching as far as the eye can see, wooden planks barely keeping your feet from sinking, sandbagged walls rising only a few feet around you. Walls in which remains of the unburied dead stuck out.
The air is thick with smoke. The thrum of artillery shakes the ground beneath your feet. Around you, soldiers lived shoulder to shoulder. There are rats and filth. You know that at any moment a shell could explode, a rifle bullet could tear into you, or a deadly cloud of gas could drift over that parapet.
For four long years, millions of men endured this harsh, claustrophobic reality, where even the smallest injury or illness could prove fatal.
In today's episode, we're going to be exploring how soldiers managed to survive this relentless environment, what threats lurked in the trenches beyond enemy fire, and the human ingenuity, the resilience, the camaraderie that kept them alive through one of history's deadliest wars. And not just alive. In fact, for some of them, they even enjoyed.
I'm joined by Joshua Levine, author of lots and lots of wonderful books. Most pertinent to today's discussion, Forgotten Voices of the Somme, and that draws on first-hand accounts to document the day-to-day struggles of trench life and the heat of combat during the Battle of the Somme. Right, let's get into it. Josh Levine, good to see you. Lovely to be here, Dan, thanks.
Let's take the biggest question out of the way first. We talk about trench warfare, we talk about the Western Front. So from, let's say, late 1914 to sort of 1916, that era, what is a trench? What would it have looked like?
So, well, let's define what a trench is in the first place, because it's not necessarily straightforward. A trench, clearly... is digging in in order to defend yourself from whatever the enemy is throwing at you, whether it's coming at you, whether it's firing at you, and has been around for thousands of years. It's a really basic, fundamental idea. And over the years, it became more elaborate.
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Chapter 2: What was life like in the trenches of World War I?
None of this, none of what happened was in any way anticipated. It was going to be a mobile war. At the beginning, it was a mobile war, but you had the Germans held up as they were advancing at the Marne. And then you had them building a series of trenches and the British in response built trenches. And I've got this extraordinary account that I found in the National Archive from an observer.
So someone flying alongside a pilot because the airplanes at this point were doing reconnaissance. looking down and on the Aisne, on the 13th of September, so, you know, really soon into the war, seeing the Germans building trenches. That's really the kickoff point for the First World War as we know it.
So then the British would build or the Allies would build trenches and that began the race to the sea. And what that meant was basically trying to outflank, trying to outflank, trying to outflank. But every time an outflanking move was made, another trench was built.
So trench, trench, trench, trench, trench, all the way to the North Sea on one side and the frontier with Switzerland on the other side. So what, over 400 miles you're talking about.
So firepower revolution has happened. So the air is so full of supersonic shell fragments and shrapnel and rifle bullets, machine gun bullets, that actually to stay alive, you have to go underground.
And if you think about the developments that have been made, so this is a time of incredible development in terms of weaponry. So what were some of these developments? Well, in terms of artillery, guns didn't have to be recalibrated. In the old days, they would jump backwards and you'd have to mount them, set them up again. Yeah. Didn't have to do that now.
So, you know, your rate of fire was so much quicker and also, you know, the power, the strength of them. You know, I was trying to work it out the other day that one of the, you know, the stock field gun, British field gun, the 18 pounder, I think you could, what could it fire to? It could fire, if you put it in Charing Cross, I think I'm right in saying it could hit gold as green.
Not that you'd want to, but you could. And, and even the machine guns, you know, the, the, the development of the machine guns, you know, you had the Vickers gun, which was the heavy gun on British side, the Lewis gun, which was the, the light machine gun could be carried by one man. It could be fired from the shoulder, fired from the hip or set up on a bipod.
You know, that could, that could reach Camden town. I worked out. You know, these were, and firing hundreds of rounds a minute.
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Chapter 3: What were the daily dangers faced by soldiers in the trenches?
I mean, people like to say, oh, yes, this was for X, this was for Y. You know, you've got a huge system of trenches covering hundreds of miles over... over four years. I mean, they were used for what they were used for.
And so you spent not that long, a couple of days.
You spent a few days in the front line.
But you'd get muddy and filthy.
You'd get absolutely muddy and filthy. And again, it depended where you were. Of course. It depended on the time of year. And it depended on many, many things. But yes, I mean, it is true to say that a lot of the time you were living in filth. Yeah. You were living with rats. You were living with lice. You might have trench foot. You know, trench foot was, you know, the boots were leather.
They were perfectly good. I think they got better boots in 1915. But, you know, 20,000 people had trench foot by the end of 1914. And your feet got wet.
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Chapter 4: How did soldiers manage to survive in such harsh conditions?
cold. They never dried out and they almost started to rot. You know, people ended up with gangrene, they were losing toes, they were losing. And so, you know, you had foot inspection, you know, in the morning where officers, it's a surreal picture where officers were sort of inspecting the feet of their men. It's almost like the, you know, the Pope kissing the feet of the people. And
And they would rub whale oil in, into their feet, into their socks. The boots were changed slightly so they were rough on the outside so you could rub oil in and make them more waterproof. In certain very wet areas, Flanders, for example, people were given rubber waders or rubber boots. So that was, you know, and then after they'd more or less eradicated it, it actually became a crime.
It was considered a self-inflicted wound to have trench fever. Trench fever, you got from the feces of lice and basically you had the lice you'd be scratching and...
feces will get inside or the poison will get inside and that was a really nasty disease it took a while to incubate and then you were you know high fever and pain for five days it would go it would come back and then it was one of these kind of things we'll probably move on to this but you know because you're out of action potentially for three months didn't kill you um people saw it as almost as good as a blighty wound you know you were out of the line for three months you felt terrible
But you weren't going to die. So, you know, there was that. There was the mud. There was the cold. And the unburied dead from previous attacks. Unburied dead. Unburied dead inside the trenches. You know, sometimes the walls were built up. There was a story of one man that was talking about walking down one of the communication trenches to get to the front line.
And he said there was an arm sticking out and we never moved it because it became a sort of friend. Some people would shake his hand. Some people would say, you know, hello, chum. And it became part of the grim humor. But, you know, it also shows that there were people inside the fabric of the trench. One man said, you know, he moved into a. trench that had recently been a French trench.
And he was doing some wiring one night. And he fell into basically some bodies, some decomposed bodies. And he said it was the most disgusting feeling. He sort of pulled himself out of it. I think he said it was like jam.
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Chapter 5: How did trench systems evolve during World War I?
And he pulled himself... I mean, can you imagine just the astonishing...
And we haven't really talked about enemy fire particularly yet. But so that's the condition in the frontline trench. You mentioned the communication trench. So they have a lot of time on their hands and a lot of bodies. So they're digging back to a second line of trenches and even a third line, are they? So the troops are sort of rotating through.
So after some time in the frontline, you might go back to the second line. So you'd have a very different experience. And then beyond the third line, you might go back to have a bit of R&R way back. So... Your experience on the Western Front would be very different depending on your rotation. Absolutely.
And, you know, like I said, there is this idea you were always there, stand two, and you're always ready to go over the top. Of course, that's not true. The support trench, which would be, I don't know, about 100 yards behind, you'd have been a kind of reserve troop and there'd be supplies in there, there'd be soldiers ready to move forward if necessary.
You'd have a reserve trench quite a lot further back, 500 yards further back, and there you might have a regimental aid post, you know, the first of the medical posts. You might have a command post, you might have a... I don't know, some kind of... Bit of a bigger kitchen perhaps? Yeah, absolutely. Start punching out some hot food.
And then you have communication trenches leading all the way back. You know, it was a proper maze. If you were arriving in the trenches, you would hopefully have a guide to bring you forward because, you know, it was very complicated to know exactly where. Trenches had names, you know, communication trenches had names, the junctions had names, you know, from wherever the local troops were from.
If they were Scottish, they'd be Glasgow names, London might be Piccadilly Circus. And so it was a complicated business. You would go back to the reserve trench. You would go behind the lines. Whereas you say you would have some, you know, you'd have a bath for one thing. You'd be able to clean up. You'd be able to go and see a concert party. You could, you know, there were things you could do.
And then you might get some leave, you know, every year, 18 months, you might get to go home. And that's another story again, because you were living such a different life. to anyone at home, that it could be a great relief to be home or it could be a massive culture shock and a disappointment.
And they're year round. And in a way, it's that rotation that allows you, because in winter, some of those frontline trenches, if you kept men in for a long time, they died. But it's the fact that we've got this sophisticated system, massive state-funded, state-backed, sophisticated modern nation states are able to keep these people in these trenches. To keep a city. To keep a city in the field.
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Chapter 6: What were the significant developments in weaponry during the war?
It's a dangerous, often boring place to be at the best of times. Let's talk about the worst of times. Places like Flanders, people will be familiar with, very, very famous in the First World War context. Low-lying, below sea level sometimes, or at sea level. Drainage systems smashed. So marsh, bog. So the trenches become those drainage systems.
So you're wading around in water, effluent, mud, sewage, muck. January, December, February. I mean, nightmarish. As well as all that, you've got the enemy. So you've got no man's land. And then you've got snipers. Tell me, how many ways to die are there in a trench?
Many, many ways to die in a trench. So, I mean, I suppose... You've got to make the point that the trench was relatively safe. If you were going over the top on an advance, you were in a great deal more danger. But there were many ways to die in the trench or indeed at night coming out of the trench. So I suppose your biggest danger on a day-to-day basis was artillery.
So the trenches would all be, they wouldn't be straight. they would be zigzagged. And of course, if you think about it, that makes perfect sense. You'd have these traverses. And the idea being that if a shell exploded in the trench, the force of it couldn't go all the way down. It would be broken by these crenellations, if you like.
And it also meant that if somebody got into your trench, enemy got into it, they couldn't fire all the way down. Or indeed, if a group got in, they couldn't just run all the way down. They were sort of held up as they moved along. So 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.
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Chapter 7: What were the psychological challenges of trench warfare?
I've done a lot of eating in trenches over the years. Josh, this is the end, if you like, on one of the hardest things to talk about.
Yeah.
And it's something that a lot of people watching this video may get almost offended by. In all the research you've done, you've looked at so many sources. Is there a sense that at certain times, at certain places, people actually quite enjoyed it? Yes.
Yeah. And it's almost difficult to say. You know how consensus builds up about all different events over the years and whether it's this or 9-11 or whatever it is. And you're not really allowed to, you know, to kick against the... But yes, they did. Some people did. Now, clearly, nobody had a wonderful time and thought, you know, this next year I'm going to the trenches, not Skigness.
That was not how it was. However, there were people who said, you know... Well, no, actually, I qualify that. There were people who very sheepishly after the war said this was, in some ways, was the best time of my life. Because, not because of the danger, although I think certain people do experience heightened excitement and to kind of get off on that kind of thing. But I think more for...
The comradeship, more for the fact that, you know, back in Blighty, people lived their lives and their lives could be terribly mundane. They live and they die and, you know, they didn't particularly get close to others. I think here people became very, very close. They laughed together. They relied on each other.
You know, what you might have remembered about the morning was, you know, less the shelling and more the fact that someone made you a cup of tea. And I think that was important. And I think when people got home after the war, a lot of people actually missed that. They didn't have that same sense of belonging. Also a sense of purpose. For a lot of people, there was no, what are we doing?
This is completely mindless. Why are we trying to kill other people that we don't have any hatred for? But at another level, it gave people a meaning, something to do that they perhaps not had before. It gave people new, you know, they could, when they were behind the lines, they experienced a new culture.
Now, I'm not saying that every, you know, these were culture vultures who couldn't wait to get to Paris to go and see the paintings. But on the other hand, in all kinds of different ways, you know, so many expressions we have nowadays come from that period. Egg and chips. What's more English than egg and chips? This meal they first had in France. Really?
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