The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (61 page)

The trenches of the First World War were a marvel of engineering, proving once again that war is what people do best. Thicker and more impenetrable than the Great Wall of China, created by more digging than went into a major canal, and fed by more railroad mileage than you would find in most countries, the trench network was a long, thin, underground city of over a million residents, backed up by rail yards, hospitals, theaters, churches, warehouses, pubs, and whorehouses—split between two rival street gangs.

Dug deep enough for soldiers to move freely without crouching, and too narrow to be an easy target for artillery, trenches were never straight, but kinked and notched into bays and traverses so that no single enemy could drop in and machine gun down the entire length of the firing line. Bomb blasts were also confined to small stretches by these zigzags. Given enough time on a static front, soldiers might add an elevated plank floor and makeshift stick or plank walls to keep the earth in place. Heavily reinforced burrows were planted deep underground as living quarters and bomb shelters. Periscopes kept an eye on the enemy.

Steps and platforms were cut into the dirt so soldiers could climb up to ground level and fire into attackers. Piles of sandbags along the rim of the parapet extended cover above ground, but were arranged to leave tiny loopholes through which to aim and fire. A tangle of barbed wire was strung out front in no-man’s-land to slow the enemy advance and snag enemy soldiers long enough for the defenders to rake them with machine-gun fire. Uniforms were changed to drab, inconspicuous colors that blended with the dirt, and steel helmets replaced cloth caps to protect soldiers in trenches from shells bursting overhead and shrapnel raining down.
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Behind the firing line, communication trenches zigzagged up from the rear to move supplies, casualties, messengers, and reinforcements back and forth. Buried telephone lines kept commanders in touch with the front. A second line of defense was built safely beyond the range of enemy artillery, making the capture of the front trench only one small step on a long ugly road. A third line of defense backed up the second.

Once the trench network was complete, it was almost possible to walk below ground level all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel. Not the whole way, of course. Rivers and cliffs broke the line here and there, and fortifications in soggy terrain had to be built upward, rather than dug downward into the water table. Forts on solid rock were also built upward rather than down, but it would still be possible to walk mile after mile with your head below where your feet belonged.

It was hoped that other technology could be used to counteract the defensive advantage of the machine gun. The Germans tried mustard gas at the Battle of Ypres in 1915. This poison raises blisters on any contaminated tissue, and it created a horrible new way to die (drowning in the fluids released by blistered lungs), but it failed to achieve a breakthrough. The British deployed primitive tanks in 1916, which crawled on treads over most obstacles. Armored hulls protected the crew, and machine guns and light cannon bristled from the sides to clear the enemy trenches.
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Unlike most modern tanks, the first models had no turret for fear that the extra weight would tip the tank over.

The wisdom at the time declared that “artillery conquers; infantry occupies.”
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The preferred method of breaking the trenches began with a curtain of covering artillery fire, called a barrage after the French word for barrier. This would rip apart barbed-wire obstacles and drive the defending troops to seek safety deep underground, where they were unable to fire into the attacking lines. With proper timing, the attackers would arrive just as the last scheduled artillery shell came crashing down. As the barrage shifted downfield to cut off reinforcements, the attackers would hop into the enemy trenches and take possession before the defenders came rushing out of their bombproof shelters. It was so simple.

Unfortunately any number of snags could throw a barrage off schedule. If the attackers advanced too quickly or the barrage didn’t stop in time, the artillery could easily end up shelling their own troops, but if the barrage was lifted too early or the attackers were delayed, the defenders could redeploy and mow down the attackers caught out in the open. Lacking reliable portable radios, World War I foot soldiers had no way to change plans based on the realities at the front.
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As cannons became more powerful, shells landed far beyond the line of sight, so airplanes had to fly overhead to spot targets. These frail biplanes were unable to carry heavy weapons that might directly affect the battle on the ground, but on general principle, enemy pilots began to shoot at each other whenever their paths crossed. This soon developed into flashy, formal, but ultimately useless aerial dogfighting.

The Germans pioneered defense in depth. They realized that there was no point in packing your whole army into the front trenches, within easy reach of enemy artillery. All you needed was a skirmish line to sound the alarm and enough machine gunners to delay an infantry attack long enough for your own artillery to be brought to bear. The bulk of the army could be kept safely beyond artillery range in a second line of trenches and be sent forward only when necessary.

The Big Battles

The years of trench stalemate produced some actual battles in which armies made plans, attacked, retreated, regrouped, and counterattacked. Generally, the hope was to punch through the trenches and reach open country beyond, where maneuver and cleverness could be brought back into the tactical equation. If that failed, the hope was that you would kill more of theirs than they killed of yours, until finally the last man standing won the war. Here’s a list of big battles just in case you see a name in a book or on a test.

The only absolutely vital detail you need to know about any of these battles is that 19,240 British were killed on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, most of them in just a few minutes charging across no-man’s-land.
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As a purely practical matter, the number of British dead on the first day of the Somme accounted for maybe 1,400 tons of rotting tissue and bone littering the battlefield. Disposal on that scale would have been a logistical nightmare even in peacetime, but in wartime it was too dangerous for burial parties to collect bodies from no-man’s-land. Eventually it was discovered that a thriving population of rats in the trench zone would clean the flesh off the skeletons very quickly, so it became the official policy to leave the rats alone and let them do their thing.
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Because the war was fought by educated societies, thousands of letters sent home have been collected in books and archives across Europe, documenting the harrowing experience of battle. Open any history of the war and you’ll find dozens of small stories describing what it was like to be in the middle of it.

We crawled on our bellies to the edge of the forest, while the shells came whistling and whining above us, tearing tree trunks and branches to shreds. Then the shells came down again on the edge of the forest, flinging up clouds of earth, stones, and roots, and enveloping everything in a disgusting, sickening yellowy-green vapor. . . . I jumped up and ran as fast as I could across meadows and beet fields, jumping over trenches, hedgerows, and barbed-wire entanglements, and then I heard someone shouting ahead of me: “In here! Everyone in here!” There was a long trench in front of me, and in an instant I had jumped into it . . . under me were dead and wounded Englishmen. . . . Now I knew why I had landed so softly when I jumped in. . . . An unending storm of iron came screaming over our trench. At last, at ten o’clock, our artillery opened up in this sector. One—two—three—five—and so it went on. Time and again a shell burst in the English trenches in front of us. The poor devils came swarming out like ants from an antheap, and we hurled ourselves at them. In a flash we had crossed the fields in front of us, and after bloody hand-to-hand fighting in some places, we threw them out of one trench after another. Most of them raised their hands above their heads. Anyone who refused to surrender was mown down. In this way we cleared trench after trench.

. . . Four times we went forward and each time we were forced to retreat. In my company only one other man was left besides myself, and then he also fell. A shot tore off the entire left sleeve of my tunic, but by a miracle I remained unharmed.
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And the young letter writer, Adolf Hitler, survived the war.

Elsewhere

More than most wars, the First World War killed people you might encounter in other contexts. Henry Moseley, the physicist who had discovered the secret behind atomic numbers, was shot down at Gallipoli. Umberto Boccioni, the Italian sculptor of the Futurist movement, died in a training accident. The British writer H. H. Munro and the American poet Joyce Kilmer were killed in combat. The French cubist sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon died of typhoid fever in camp. George Llewelyn-Davies, one of the children who inspired J. M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan
, was shot through the head in Flanders. This was probably the most democratic war in history. The nations of Europe sacrificed an entire generation, regardless of individual talents, accomplishments, or connections.
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It’s easiest to think of the First World War as a black hole or bonfire of a war—a static line of trenches cutting across western Europe, hungrily devouring the resources of an entire world. It wasn’t just the nations close to the front—Germany, France, England—that shoveled their sons into the flames. Young men were imported from all over the world—America, Australia, India, Senegal—to feed the monster.

Obviously that’s not the whole story, and the world war certainly lived up to its name. Ottoman Turkey, which controlled most of the Middle East, jumped in to prevent its old enemy Russia from gaining any advantage in the Balkans. This attracted small, mostly British, colonial armies to nibble at the edges of the Ottoman Empire, trying to punch through and hook up with Russia. The British pushed into Palestine from Egypt, capturing Jerusalem and incidentally fighting a battle at Armageddon (yes, it’s a real place). An army from British India invaded Mesopotamia but was cornered and besieged at Kut. After several months of eating horses, rats, and belts, this force surrendered to the Turks.

The most ambitious effort against Turkey began with a British naval attack directly into the Dardanelles strait to capture Constantinople and to open access to Russian ports on the Black Sea (February 1915). The plan failed right from the beginning, mostly because the British had not considered the possibility that this crucial pathway through the heart of enemy territory might be heavily guarded. Maritime minefields and shore batteries sank three warships and damaged all the rest coming and going. The Allies then decided that they needed to land a full army on the Gallipoli Peninsula and take the Turkish shore batteries, but unfortunately they had brought only enough troops to parade through Constantinople after it fell. The fleet popped across the Mediterranean to pick up untested Australian troops training in Egypt, and then waited while veteran British troops were shipped over from the western front. This delay gave the Turks a chance to reinforce and dig in. The Allies were slaughtered while landing on the beaches, then slaughtered some more as they tried to break out of the beach head, and slaughtered again as they crept uphill against the defenders. After banging uselessly against the Turks for several months, the Allies gave up and sailed away.

After about a year of neutrality, Italy shopped around for the best offer and joined the Allies when they offered Italy the Alps and Adriatic coast from Austria-Hungary. Because so much of the short border between Italy and Austria was rugged mountains, this front quickly collapsed into another static line that chewed up armies in one shallow offensive after another.