HELL IN THE TRENCHES
War historian explores awful realities
From The Secret History of Soldiers by Ottawa historian and writer Tim Cook.
*A warning, the following excerpt contains graphic descriptions that will upset some readers*
On the Western Front, living soldiers became martyred corpses in the blink of an eye.
The blurring of the living and the dead only added to the apocalyptic landscape.
Grimy, exhausted soldiers, slathered in mud, asleep on a fire-step or in a funk hole, could easily be mistaken for the dead. It was not lost on the soldiers that they appeared to be digging extended graves — the trenches — to protect themselves from death-dealing artillery shells. And in a sick irony, the artillery bombardments often buried the living and disgorged the dead.
Human remains in varying degrees of disintegration littered the landscape. Shellfire dismembered men, while those killed in No Man’s Land were often lost in the shell craters and slowly rotted away. Private John McNab of the 38th Battalion tried to capture in words the wasteland of Passchendaele in November 1917, sadly noting in his diary, “The ground is all covered with dead as far as you can see.”
Canadian John Patrick Teahan, who managed the family’s furniture store in Windsor, Ont., before enlisting, was so disturbed by the crippling rate of loss that he believed the Western Front would soon be reduced to “one huge uncovered grave.”
There was no avoiding the things that once were men. The stench of rotting flesh — “The smell of corruption,” as one Canadian put it — wafted out of dark holes and from No Man’s Land in draughts of gut-churning stink.
The smell of dead men worked its way into clothing and pervaded food. Some soldiers tried to describe the sickly sweet and revolting stench of the rotting dead, but for most it was beyond their literary talents.
Even if the trench dwellers learned to live with the smell, particularly ripe fronts of decaying men left survivors unable to eat, with soldiers opting to go hungry rather than try to cook or consume food in such conditions. Cigarettes masked some of the olfactory assault.
The masses of the dead, buried on top of one another or spread throughout different parts of the battlefield, were like some morbid archeological dig. “These bodies lying in No Man’s Land,” wrote Private Donald Fraser, a Scottish-born immigrant to Canada in 1906 who had worked as a clerk in the Royal Trust Company in Vancouver before enlisting in the 31st Battalion, “made me interested in the history of this line and I made enquiries regarding the former occupants of this part.”
Fraser uncovered the history of the battlefield by studying the layers of bodies, and even gauged when they had fought and died by the extent of their putrefaction. Some infantrymen took pride in locating the dead in other ways, with Louis Keene, a prewar artist and wartime lieutenant in a machine-gun unit, remarking, “I am an authority on smells.
I can almost tell the nationality of a corpse by the smell.”
Another Canadian, Charles Henry Savage, recalled in a postwar memoir his fascination with the carcasses laid before him in one bloody sector: “It was possible to read the story of attack and defence by the grouping of the dead. Here was the assault trench, broken by shell holes, each one with its circle of mangled and half-buried bodies: the German counter-barrage had been accurate. Immediately in front of the assault trench the ground was clear — it had been crossed before the enemy had had time to bring his machine guns and rifles into action. Then for fifty yards the rich harvest reaped by machine guns playing on massed men lay thick on the ground. But at one spot there were few dead: our artillery had made at least a dozen direct hits on about fifty yards of German trench. There had been no one left to resist: our men were in.
But what of that circle of huddled bodies on the left? About what deadly centre had this line been drawn? A machine gun superbly handled stopped everything there. It was never reached from in front: the gunners were shot or bayoneted by our men coming in from the flanks. They died on their gun. And those men half kneeling, half lying in grotesque attitudes? The wire had not been cut in front of them: that is what is holding them up. They died on the wire.”
While soldiers engaged in their constant cycle through the front line, the dead remained behind.
They were the permanent residents of the trenches and No Man’s Land. The dead were a part of the landscape, even becoming informal markers, much like decaying trench signs.
Stealth patrols could navigate by the steadily reduced corpses of No Man’s Land, with the dead acting as way-finders.
In long campaigns like the Somme or Passchendaele, as the Allies inched their way forward, they often incorporated the dead, in single or mass graves, into their own lines.
Jim Broomhead, a twentyyear-old sniper with the 46th Battalion, spoke of his revulsion on the Somme: “I got my first glimpse of death and its stench at Pozieres. The dead had not been removed, and they were piled three deep. What an awful sight! ... God forbid anybody from seeing what I saw. Our barbed wire was fairly well intact, but it hung full of dead Canadians and Germans, like birds on telephone wires. The parapet had been kept built up, but you couldn’t avoid the arms and legs that were sticking out of it.”
Dead men caught on the barbed wire, like nightmarish scarecrows, were a constant reminder to soldiers of their possible destiny. But the soldiers faced their fate, even taunted it. One hauntingly bitter song, Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire, had lyrics describing where the infantrymen would end up:
“If you want the old battalion
/ I know where they are / I know where they are / I know where they are / They’re hanging on the old barbed wire, / I saw them, I saw them / Hanging on the old barbed wire ...”
It is hard to imagine soldiers calling the trenches home, but they did. They had to. And within their protective space they lived cheek by jowl with corpses. Private Herbert Burrell described how the dead were “protruding through the trench walls.”
In digging trenches, soldiers used pick axes and shovels to hack through the bones and bodies of buried men within the trench walls or underfoot.
Another Canadian infantryman, Corporal John Harold Becker, wrote about digging a hole in which to curl up and shelter from the rain: “In the late afternoon I was resting in this water, soaked to the hide, when the side wall gave way and I found myself lying against a corpse that had been buried there some time before. The stench was terrific but as there were always bad smells in the line, I paid no particular attention to that! I did, however, show sufficient regard for my ‘na-pooed’ neighbour to pack the dirt in around him and scooped myself out another funkhole a few feet to the north.”
This is the stuff of horror movies, but rendered normal in nonchalant prose.
“It is strange how quickly we get accustomed to seeing death and hearing of the death of men we know,” observed Armine Norris in a letter he wrote to his mother.
Some men shielded themselves from contemplating their own violent passing by trivializing the dead through seemingly deviant or uncivilized behaviour. “Along the road was an unburied hand of a soldier,” recounted Lieutenant Fred Wells. “Some of our ‘wags’ would pretend to shake hands with it — a bit of humour along the way.”
Body parts protruding from the walls were touched for good luck; gas masks and helmets were hung from flesh-picked bones, with ulnae and femurs emerging like white branches and tree roots.
“We are all used to dead bodies or pieces of men, so much so that we are not troubled by the sight of them,” scoffed one Canadian.
“There was a right hand sticking out of the trench in the position of a man trying to shake hands with you, and as the men filed out they would often grip it and say, ‘So long, old top, we’ll be back again soon.’ ”
With the hollow-eyed and filthy soldiers looking like the living dead and living with the recently — and not so recently — killed, it is not surprising that trench soldiers developed a familiar acquaintance with the bodies of the unknown slain. Such soldiers’ actions seem shocking in their callousness, but they were one way to cope with living in the land of the dead.
Our barbed wire was fairly well intact, but it hung full of dead Canadians and Germans, like birds on telephone wires. The parapet had been kept built up, but you couldn’t avoid the arms and legs that were sticking out of it.