A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Changing Nature of War 893

rows of barbed wire protected the trenches from attack. As the months
passed in sectors where the front lines were immobile, the trenches became
more elaborate, offering electricity and a certain minimal level of comfort.
When there was no fighting, the soldiers confronted boredom. The French
theater star Sarah Bernhardt, who had herself lost one leg to amputation
(because of several bad falls) was carried on a stretcher near the front so
she could entertain soldiers by reciting poetry. Some soldiers read vora­
ciously to pass the time; the British poet Siegfried Sassoon was only half
kidding when he remembered, “I didn’t want to die, not before I’d finished
reading The Return of the Native anyway.” Since they were below ground,
trenches offered soldiers some protection from rifle or pistol fire, but not
from direct artillery hits. The periscope, sticking up from the trench below,
provided the only safe way of looking across at the enemy lines without
being shot by enemy snipers.
The front-line soldier lived amidst the thunder of barrages and the scream
of falling shells. Persistent lice, mice, and enormous rats were his constant
companions in the stagnant water of the trenches. So, for many, was vene­
real disease, contracted in the brothels near the front. A British soldier
described a night in the trenches in January 1916:

Lights out. Now the rats and the lice are the masters of the house. You

can hear the rats nibbling, running, jumping, rushing from plank to

plank, emitting their little squeals behind the dugout’s corrugated

metal. It’s a noisy swarming activity that just won’t stop. At any moment

I expect one to land on my nose. And then it’s the lice and fleas that

begin to devour me. Absolutely impossible to get any shut-eye. Toward

midnight I begin to doze off. A terrible racket makes me jump. Artillery

fire, the cracking of rifle and machine-gun fire. The Boches [Germans]

must be attacking.... Everything shakes. Our artillery thunders away

without pause. ... I doze off so as to get up at six. The rats and the lice

get up too; waking to life is also waking to misery.

The cold and wind tore into the troops, especially in winter. “Before you

can have a drink,” one soldier wrote home, “you have to chip away the ice.

The meat is frozen solid, the potatoes are bonded by ice, and even the

hand grenades are welded together in their cases.” The German army had

been so sure of an easy victory that it had not equipped its men w'ith high

lace-up boots or adequate coats. German troops prized the British soldiers’

sheepskin coats and removed them from enemy corpses when they had the

chance. After battle, the screams of the wounded and dying filled the air;

groans in German, French, and English from no-man’s-land grew' increas­

ingly faint, but sometimes lasted for days.

Death was everywhere. It numbed. An Austrian soldier, a violinist, w'rote:

“A certain fierceness arises in you, an absolute indifference to anything the

world holds except your duty of fighting. You are eating a crust of bread,