JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1265

Perhaps one of the worst inventions in the history of warfare was The Trench. Millions of men were wounded or met their ends while defending one, or attacking one, or being in-between two of them.  Hundreds of thousands of troops spent months charging back and forth between opposing lines, the ground over which they fought made uninhabitable for almost any form of life. 

Earlier in this blog I wrote about sub-trench warfare--the story of the sappers who would mine underground, underneath the opposing force’s lines,  digging a horizontal hole the end of which would be filled with explosives and detonated, exploding up, destroying the enemy’s trenches. Bad business.  The trenches were bad enough without having to be vigilant against someone tunneling beneath, trying to make you into little pieces. Trenches were mostly cold, dark, miserable, wet, potential disease carriers, poison gas accumulators–and that’s of course before the shooting began.  There were thousands of men–tens of thousands of men, hundreds of thousands–waiting in their trenches, waiting for the other side to try and advance, attack over the well-named no-man’s land, running across open ground in a hail of millions of bullets.

I’ve collected a few images that are here (and available at our blog bookstore) that give a little flavor of the trenches, and the men in the trenches–though without the scent of the stale water, or the bite of the chill, or the perpetually wet feet, or the cold, or the dysentery, or death’s constant pull and struggle.

This is an original photograph made by the Western Newspaper Union Photo Service, as a “British Official Photograph”  (with the “British” part penciled out and replaced by an unknown hand, “Italian”),  The photo agency supplied a caption for the image (that was supposed to have been used by the newspaper or magazine that published the picuture) as follows:

And the detail:

I’ve also put together a few examples from a collection of exceptional photogravures printed in 1919:

And the detail:

And a detail:

And another detail:

And a detail:

 

 

And the detail: