The war was fought by men on foot, in a flat open country that gave no shelter from enemy fire

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By Ayesha Rizwi

Contents

) Trenches

2) Home Front

3) Weapons

4) War : - In the Air

At Sea

5) Literacy

War in the trenches

The war was fought by men on foot, in a flat open country that gave no shelter from enemy fire. Facing armies dug trences as fortifications from which to defend their position or attack the enemy. When the Germans turned onto the Allies, they dug trenches on the River Aisne, as a line of defence. By mid-October, two lines of trenches faced each other from the Swiss border to the Channel coast.

These single lines were soon to become a elaborate networks of defence. The trenches were fronted with masses of barbed wire and with strategically placed machine gun posts. These trench systems were everything except a let down.

There were different sectors dividing up the trenches. There was a "cushy sector", where the men could just relax and take a rest, these had little fighting where as "active sectors", there was lots of it. On "cushy sectors" the men agreed to an un-official truce to "let sleeping dogs lie". There were ways of arranging this without the generals knowing. Gunners would fire there guns at a specific time, to let the other side get out of the way. No one shot at each others toilets, in case the others did the same back.

Since most soldiers in the sectors wanted to stay alive, they were left to themselves. If the men on the other trench weren't trying to kill them ,why should they kill them? The phrase "live and let live" was first used in the summer of 1915. "Live and let live" drove the generals crazy, but there was so much that they could do about it.

What was life like in the trenches?

Life in the trenches was a nightmare on its own. When it rained, and it often did, the trenches would be flooded for up to weeks at a time. The men had to eat, sleep and fight in wet uniforms constantly. They were surrounded by mud, water and pests. They often had to endure searing heat or bitter cold.

The trenches had to be easily repaired, because due to the \raining, there would sometimes be small mudslides. This is when the mud from one side of the trench was would slip off.

Conditions

The soldier would often have to live like this for up to weeks at a time like this. Food and sanitation were poor at best and non existent at worst. They had to deal with rats and lice living off them all the time. The rats fed on the dead bodys of men who had already died, and the lice on the livng bodies of the solider, since they were stuck in damp uniform all the time.

They tried to make the trenches more suitable for the men by making a resting area, a toilet area, an eating area and so on.

Illnesses.

The men suffered from many illnesses. These were:

Trench foot

Trench foot was caused by a microscopic fungus, that breed in cold and damp conditions. This was first spotted by the Britsh Expeditionary Force in the muddy wintry trenches of France in 1914. The infected foot could have swollen up to 3 times it size and lose its sense of touch. So much that a soldier once used the expression
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" you can run a bayonet through it"

That year, over 20,000 British Soldiers suffered from trench foot. They sometimes had to have there entire foot amputated because the foot would have gone gangrenous and would have caused the soldiers a lot of pain. In 1915, the living conditions improved slighty so there was less disease from then on, but it was still a major problem.

Trench Fever

This was a fever which spread through the trenches fast & affected huge numbers of men in 1915. It was carried from one man to the next, ...

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