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gas carried in artillery shells and deploying with lethal effectiveness when shells exploded in or close to enemy trenches burned exposed skin and when inhaled inflicted hideous and painful internal injuries. Gas masks protected to a degree but the chemical agents used often rendered soldiers weak and barely able to function as gasses seeped under clothing and came into contact with skin.

Barrages day and night from both ship and land based guns harried and decimated trench systems. Sometimes a concentrated barrage was prelude to an attack where soldiers hoping for better odds climbed out of their trenches and ran across open ground desperately hoping to engage the enemy in opposing trenches while they were still disoriented and wounded, and before they could reorganize. More often than not these attacks became a massacre where soldiers were cut down like mown wheat as they attempted to storm the opposite trenches. Enemy soldiers rapidly poured back into their trenches from rearward positions as soon as the barrages ceased and swiftly repelled the unfortunates ordered over the top into what became known as no man's land'

Air raids although still fairly primitive, war planes of WWI played their part in trench warfare by observing and often over-flying enemy trenches at which time pilots took every possible opportunity to drop a bomb or two by way of greeting. Unfortunately for the pilots these planes were fairly vulnerable and easily dispatched by return fire yet a significant number of these attacks succeeded and became another of many deadly perils stacked against the odds of surviving trench warfare of WWI.

Life in the trenches of WWI was one of the most horrific experiences endured by soldiers throughout known history of warfare. It was a static form of war where neither side gained much for months on end yet men and resources continued to be thrown into these theatres of war in the hopes of gaining a precious few hundred yards of strategic ground. The cost of success was counted in thousands of lives wasted by disease, being cut down by enemy fire, buried alive or killed in the endless rain of deadly high explosives and poison gas. The Officers and Men on both sides of this conflict endured unimaginable horror and as WWII illustrated some 21 years later they sacrificed their lives and gained nothing.

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