Not everybody could sleep in a dugout and so they made funk holes, which are small holes carved out, with a shovel, of the side of the trench where one person would sleep. When it was raining, soldiers would drape a waterproof sheet over the opening and would rest in there funk hole.
It was 6.45 when we were served some breakfast consisting of fried eggs, bacon, bread and jam or butter, and tea. Around about 3,240,948 tons of food is sent to us from the soldiers. Britain employed 300,000 field workers to cook and supply the food for us lot. Maybe one day if more and more soldiers come in to the trenches we will need more food to go around every person. I heard that the cooks give you foods, which are healthy, like the disgusting sprouts and things like that. They would make us have a diet because we men eat too much. Meals and drinks were prepared and then were carried from the cook’s kitchen at the reserve trench and travelled to us and placed in front of us. In camp they said that the battalion's kitchen staff had just two large vats, in which everything was prepared and that made many people complain with this but us Britons couldn’t afford any more. The catering staffs puts the food in dixies (which are cooking pots), petrol cans or old jam jars and they carry it up from the reserve trench in straw-lined boxes. My new mates said by the time the food reached the front-line it was always cold. Couldn’t they build them closer to the trenches, but it is taking a risk that it could get boomed, maybe. There is still a shortage of food to go around the place and so we had to bring some emergency food called an iron ration and this included a can of bully beef, a few biscuits and a sealed tin of tea and sugar. How can we eat our food in the trenches all smelly with mud and also the smell of dead bodies? Somebody fainted and was carried to the medics and when he woke up he puked everywhere and sadly he died. This I heard from my new mates but they said ‘please don’t tell anybody else because he was the best mate we had as he saved all of our lives’. So I am going to keep this a secret. I thought that we won’t get any treats but we do and they are my favourite: rum and whisky. I always get pissed on these but I can control it now because my mum banned me for about a year and so I hardly drink much.
Our rations were:
20 oz. Fresh or frozen meat, or 16 oz. preserved or salt meat, 20 oz. bread, or 16 oz. biscuit or flour, 4 oz. bacon, 3 oz. cheese, 5/8 oz. tea, 4 oz. jam, 3 oz. sugar,
1/2 oz. slat, 1/36 oz. pepper, 1/20 oz. mustard, 2 oz. dried vegetables, 1/10-gill lime juice if vegetable not issued (for scurvy), 1/2-gill rum (at caution of commanding general) not to go beyond 20 oz. tobacco per week.
These are the substitutions:
4 oz. oatmeal or rice instead of bread, 1/3 oz. chocolate instead of tea, 1 pint porter instead of rum, 4 oz. dried fruit instead of jam, 4 oz. butter, lard, margarine, or 1/2 gill oil instead of bacon, and finally 20 oz. weed instead of tobacco, (possible to have half of each).
In my dugout there are cartoons and pin-ups, which decorate the walls, and there was never a lack of the precious weed. Well what’s wrong with a bit of weed hay? So I sat down had some breakfast and smoked my weed.
In the middle, between the fire-step and the parapet there is a small hole, which has some ammunition boxes so it is easy to reload. At the top two edges of the trench there are piles of sandbags. The top two or three feet of the parapet and the parados both consist of a thick line of sandbags to absorb any bullets or shell fragments. The top of the side facing the enemy is called parapet and the top of the other side is called parados and this is there all the sandbags are placed. The sandbags were filled with earth. A group called a filling party usually consisted of one soldier shovelling the earth and two guys holding and tying the bags up. The men stacking the filled bags should work in pairs and were expected to move sixty bags an hour. In training I learnt that if a typical bullet were shot at a sandbag it would only penetrate fifteen inches into a sandbag.
At the top on the grounds of no-mans land there is loads and loads of thick barbed-wire entanglements, wire protecting the trenches and the soldiers. I saw some tired guys at the top of the trench helping to build more barbed wire and this job involves carrying out 6 ft. steel pickets and rolls of wire. The pickets should be knocked into place by muffled mallets. When fastened to the pickets, the wire was pulled out to make what was known as an apron. That camp has taught me loads all of this I know already in my thick head. At least I can understand it all. Anyway back to my explanation of barbed-wire, that it was usually placed far away enough from the trenches to prevent the enemy from approaching to close enough to lob grenades in and blow us up. Sometimes barbed-wire entanglements were set up in order to channel attacking infantry into machine-gun fire. In camp they told me that the barbed-wire entanglement was strong and nothing could destroy it. There was a problem if that the enemy sticks some explosives underneath the wire, it can blow up a hole in the earth and so then the enemy could crawl underneath it. So we have to watch out for that problem.
Day 2 – 15/12/1914
Dear Diary,
It was completely dangerous in the front trench and we had to stay there to watch and learn how the soldiers fought in battle and what it was like seeing it for real. This I had to learn on the first day of arriving at the trenches. Right now I am still alive thankfully, but my goal is at least last until Christmas Day and maybe just after. Life in the trenches was pretty boring, because every time you would have to battle and this felt boring and it also felt tiring and it makes you scared if you get hurt or catch a disease and especially if you are going to die. All of the soldiers though couldn’t think that and so that had to think of 1 thing, “win the war and come back to your family in peace” and this is everybody’s dream and objectives.
At super time, which was around 6.00 I ate ox-tail soup, roast beef, whisky, boiled vegetables, short bread and for some people they had coffee. I was eating with my 2 friends, Harry and Pete, and we saw some older guys who have been here for a long log time. They were very friendly and so we asked them “what is daily life like for you, here at the trenches”.
And so they told us and said that daily life was getting up at 5.00 in the morning from our bunkers. We would have a 1-minute shower and so everybody could get around with the murky water. If the shower was broken then you couldn’t have one. Usually you would have a shower every week not everyday because of the little amount of water which some of us had to carry in a bucket from a near by river. We would eat breakfast straight after being dressed at around 6.00. At dusk and dawn everybody had a routine shaped by ‘stand to’, where everybody would have to stand on the fire-step and get ordered what they are going to do this day. In the morning it would roughly last for an hour and we would have to clean all of the equipment up sort the trenches out clean all the guns, also repair any broken parts of the trench and maybe draining out the trench caused by the rain and to reinforce the walls of the trench also caused by the rainfall. Some of the jobs troops had to do were scary like adding extra barbed-wire and people found that job a lot worse then getting shell shock. After that was done the other half of the stand-to we had to aim our guns to the enemy and see if there is something going on or just fire at them if they fire to us first.
Then we would start the fighting, depending if there was any or if we had a battle, and this could go on for a long time. The trenches were very filthy and so dangerous. It is an unhealthy place and all soldiers’ cloths were covered in mud, blotches of blood and lice. It was so filthy that diseases were a huge problem. When all of the troops are cold and damp, caused by the terrible weather, lots of us could catch bronchitis and pneumonia. Also troops could catch diarrhoea because of how filthy and digesting the lavatories were and this caused people to complain. We had to wear cloths not even washed and so we could catch loads of diseases and also we would have to wear wet, old boots for long periods of time and this made people suffer from trench foot. Also mice are huge problems because they get into the troops food and they can affect it. They even eat on the scraps of the foods and dead bodies or soldiers alive who are badly injured and could die.
In the evening stand-to began in a flash and so we had to do all of the jobs again. Also in this time supplies of food and ammunition were brought from the 2nd lines, men were rescued from no-man's land to be treated or identified, and all jobs were done. Then we would have our super. On average this is what we eat for all the meals we have: Breakfast 6.00-bacon and tomatoes, bread, jam, and cocoa; Lunch 12.30-shepherd's pie, potted meat, potatoes, bread and jam; Tea 4.30- bread and jam; Supper 7.30- Some soup (they gave different flavours), roast beef, whisky or a soft drink, coffee, boiled vegetables, pudding. This was the best food you could get but the cooks don’t stick to this and they give us food, which is disgusting and also very unhealthy because of diseases and stuff and very little amount of food because they had to get around loads of soldiers.
We didn’t spend the whole of the time in the trenches. Our army worked on a 16-day timetable. Every soldier should spend eight days in the front line and four days in the support trench. Another four days were spent in a rest camp that was built in the reserve trench, (the third one), but if there was a shortage of men, some of us had to spend far longer periods at the front. This was sad because if there was a shortage of men we won’t have much time in the resting camp and for that we would be weak.
People in whose trenches really go mental and stressed caused by loads of diseases and also with the way that you could last your whole life in the filth. I have been here for around two weeks and I have seen soldiers in sheer terror and the horror of seeing men sobbing because they had trench foot that had turned gangrenous. Troops knew they might die. People are afraid of lice in there cloths and it drives people crazy. There is filth and also lack of privacy. Of huge rats that showed no fear of you as they stole your food rations. And cold deep wet mud everywhere, and of course, corpses. I'd never seen a dead body before I went to war. But in the trenches the dead are lying all around you. You could be talking to the fellow next to you when suddenly he'd be hit by a sniper and fall dead beside you. And there he would stay for days. It was terrible. In the winter, the ground was frozen and hard, in autumn rainfall would turn the battlefield and the trenches into mud baths. In some parts the water reached waist height. This is what people were seeing and thinking and now I also fear.
Day 3 – 25/12/1914
Dear Diary,
Today was Christmas day and all soldiers received a Christmas gift box and it was contributed by the ‘Sailors and Soldiers Christmas Fund’ set up by Princess Mary. It contained a Christmas card and a picture of the Princess. Also they contained a variety of chocolates or sweets, tobacco or weed, and pipes. Gifts, supplies and anything else were sent to us lot, from our friends and family. Today actually was one of the worst days but then one of the best days. It is one of the worst days because we had a huge attack on us from the enemy but today was the best day because we defeated them easily, who tried to attack and also that it is Christmas day.
The attack started when we were having the stand-to. It was early in the morning and when we were lining up to listen to our objectives today we heard some guys coming up to the trench just after we heard the objectives. So we all got our guns out and started firing out on no-mans land. We thought there were a team of Germans coming here and spying on us but we were wrong and there wasn’t a sign of anybody early in the morning. We just wasted all of our bullets and time for nothing. So the officer leading us told us to keep an eye out for anything-fishy going on. Our tactics were to collect our sword guns, the rifles with a mini sword to stab people, and we send a team of 45 out and bombard the enemy’s line. The 45 had to wear cloths that are camouflage and blend in with the colours of no-mans land. And so the team were picked out and thank god it wasn’t me because I had to keep my promise of not dying Until Christmas day and not aloud to actually die on today.
At 7.15 the team with one of my mates from home Pete in it had to go down, on no-mans, and to bombard the enemies base and plant 4 bombs and this could blow some of there front-line trench of there’s. If the plan works we could have a better chance of winning the war but very unlikely it will work. They set of and were going to try and complete the mission they were given. When we had the stand-to I still think there was some Germans who were spying because I understood a bit of the language and it sounded like ‘this is good information. Our plan will work of bombarding them underneath’. What do they mean bombarding us from underneath?
So any way the team set off and we stayed in the front-line trench and waited for a reply. We would know if the plan was a success if that we could see and hear the destruction of part of the front-line trench. Time went by and there weren’t any signs of blowing up. So one of us got out a periscope and looked over and we saw them all dead because the enemy some how knew our plan. So some guys did come but how did they hide. So I asked my officer if I could walk on no-mans land and see if I was right. So I set of in camouflage gear and I climbed up a ladder, which was on he fire-step, and walked. I found a huge hole just near us, which had 4 body marks embedded on it. They left behind this notebook, which had German language in it and had a blanket, which I left there. So I set back to the trench and showed the evidence to the officer. I was lucky because the officer knew how to write, read, speak and listen in German. He read it out and it talked about them 4 people were a team and they set of in the night for a patrol but not exactly. They were planning to build a hole just near by and they would hide there. Then they slept there till the morning and they listened to our tactics. Then they would set back to their trench whilst we were cleaning equipment and things like that. I don’t know how they could get here so easily and set back to there trench so easily. Also they were talking about a plan to blow our trench. It doesn’t make sense about blowing our trench up from underneath. So today we had to take complete caution and watch out for anything strange.
It was around 4.30 and we were on the fire-step and firing at the enemy. Suddenly the trenches started shacking a bit and half of us stopped firing and stood silently. Just from nowhere a huge hole was blown making a big bang underneath us. People fell in and we couldn’t see what was happening because it was so dusty. I saw around 10 miners and 7 soldiers all armed and it was from the enemy side and it looked like a hole, which seemed to be dug out. There could have been more soldiers behind. They sneakily built a huge tunnel from their base to ours, which must have took a long time like around a year and they started t dig again when our team was sent out. They must of dug a hole and when it was time to blow it up they would using tactics like spying on us and getting information that there won’t be many people to kill because us lot sent a team out. That was there whole plan, there pan for Christmas. So to get my revenge I quickly thought that we could get our grenades out and throw them in to the tunnel. This way the tunnel would cave in caused by the big explosion and will kill most of them. I quickly shouted out, “throw your grenades!” and so everybody did and the plan was a success. It made sense that they were going to get mines and blow part of the trench up using a plan of tunnelling, which they were calling underneath plan. Thank god it didn’t totally blow part of the trench up and only 2 or 3 died in this event and some injured. It was easy to defend because they didn’t use big enough mines to blow part of the trench and also it was easy to defend because we used grenades to cave in the miners and soldiers of the enemy and so they would die and the tunnel wouldn’t be a tunnel any more because all he mud and soil fell all the way down to there trench. Also I had good tactics. Because of my brave work and tactics I was given a medal on Christmas Day, which I am proud of.
Day 4 – 26/12/1914
Dear Diary,
Well my good day ever was over and now I am on my 26th day. Well after that event I was really tired and also injured. Right now I am in the trench hospital. Well I haven’t used all of my guns yet. These are my guns, which I am using and caring with me:
British Lee-Enfield Rifle- This is a bolt-action rifle, which is the British version. The bolt was a long tube which could stretch back and when the person using the gun presses the trigger the bolt stretches back and a metal box, connected to the gun which has some bullets in it, is dropped down and then the guy release the trigger and the bolt fires back in high speed and shoots a bullet out of the gun. This gun I carried around with me.
Grenades- I carry many grenades around with me and the British made the first grenade, which was a cast-iron canister on an 18-inch stick, called Grenade No 1. These grenades are Mill Bombs. When the grenade went off the cast-iron casing shattered producing a shower of metal fragments.
Luger Pistol- This a pistol, which was one of the best handguns, used by everybody. The Luger fired a 7-round clip of 9mm ammunition. The pistol was originally a Swiss gun then it was given to the Germans then we got it by copying it for our selves.
Webley Pistol- This is a pistol, which Officers only use but I nicked it from one of them without him noticed. The Webley was a strong heavy-calibre weapon. I think there were around 300,000 Webley pistols given to British officers and one to me.
These are the tactics, which I learnt in the camp and which could be useful to me one day:
Patrolling- Patrols was where a group of soldiers would go out on No-mans land at night and would spy on the enemy’s base and try to discover and collect information of the enemy and bring it back. Men had to take turns every time and it was a dangerous job. The team would cautiously inch their way forward on their stomachs and try to get close enough to the enemy trenches for them to hear things. Everybody who was going on a patrol had to blacken their faces with grease paint or burnt cork. We have to carry cut down rifles, sheath knives and grenades. Also to capture German soldiers for interrogation was an objective of patrols. I haven’t been on a patrol yet but may do one day.
Tunnelling- This was a new tactic, which now I know about. This tactic was when we would employ diggers to mine out a tunnel to get from one base to the enemy base. The main objective was to place mines beneath enemy defensive positions and when it was detonated, the explosion would destroy the section of the trench where the mines were placed. When the part of the trench was blown up troops can come out and shoot around and try to kill their enemy. There are ways to listen and figure out if there are people tunnelling to their base.
Preliminary Bombardment- This a tactic used in the battle of Ypres (Battle of Passchendaele). Before an infantry advance during battle, it was a good idea to bombard the enemy defences with all heavy artillery, which was available. The whole idea was that this preliminary bombardment should either kill the defending soldiers or would at least force the enemy to retreat, but I the battle Ypres it was a failure because the enemy defenders were able to return to their trench by the time the infantry advance took place. This is all of my tactics and weapons I know.