Trench Warfare in WWI.

At the beginning of the war soldiers were given a good ration of food which included tea, meat, butter, jam, sugar and bread or biscuits. These foods contained all the vital nutrients to keep soldiers strong and healthy. However these foods became less and less as the war progressed and soldiers began to fall ill from lack of nutrition. The soldiers lived in very unhygienic conditions, their toilet was a trench a little further back from the front line and they would go without washing for months.

Soldiers in the First World War wouldn't only have to share their trench with fellow soldiers a lot of other things; mainly 'wildlife' lived there to. These included lice and leeches, which would suck the blood of the soldiers. If the leeches were simply pulled off then their teeth would get stuck in the skin and the person would bleed to death. The only sure way of killing them is to burn them. Lots of other 'creatures' lived in the pool of mud, which lay in the trenches these included frogs, slugs and all sorts of pond life. If the thought of living with these turns you sick then think about eating them, this is what desperately hungry soldiers did and also ate rats and mice.

As soldiers were living cramped together in rows of trenches disease spread very quickly. This made disease a big killer in the war; many soldiers died before they even fought. Disease could be caused by the rats and lice etc... living in the trenches so all sorts of things link together. Soldiers weren't given enough food, so they ate rats, the rats were there because of the unhygienic conditions and the rats caused disease, which caused death. So if the government had cleaned up trenches and gave soldiers food there would be less death. Many diseases were caused by the bad conditions in the trenches 'Trench foot' is a disease caused by spending too much time walking in wet and damp conditions. The Soldiers foot would swell up to three times its normal size. The foot would be so numb that a bayonet (knife) could be stuck through the foot without any pain. This disease usually ended in amputation. Water based disease spread quickly and was common, as the trenches were full of swamp like water. Of course it wasn't only physical disease which soldiers suffered from. Many had ill mental health because of the terrible things they saw this is called shell shock. Soldiers acted so badly to the things they saw because no one had seen a war as bad as it before. When the soldiers joined up they were excited and expected to win the war quickly and thought that life would be easy unfortunately they were scared by what they saw. Soldiers saw their friends and family shot down around them. As whole towns of men were put in trenches together they all died at the same time leaving the towns to deal with this causing them ill mental health too. This wasn't the only mental illness British soldiers suffered they were drugged by their superiors! Their tea contained a drug to stop them from panicking and to slow down their sex drive. This kept them focused on the job at hand fighting.

Once you had joined up to fight you couldn't back down and retreat. If you tried you were named a coward, court marshalled and shot. So soldiers would give themselves convincing injuries to go home. They would shoot themselves in the foot or trigger finger pretend to be mad. This however hardly ever worked. If the wound was suspicious then you would be tried for cowardice and if found guilty shot. This may seem harsh, but if they let one person get away with it then everyone else would try to do the same.

The Germans didn't live in conditions as bad as the British so this made them healthier and stronger. Also Germans had machine guns which could easily kill a lot of men, the British had a bayonet a stick and a gun with six shots, the Germans had all this too. When soldiers were firing they stood on a fire step and shot between some sandbags this protected them but stopped them from seeing properly. Barbed wire was put outside the trench to stop intruders from getting in. Unfortunately this stopped them from getting out to attack. So before attacking, no mans land was bombed to get rid of the barbed wire. The only problem was that it gave the Germans a signal to when the British would attack.