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Life in the Trenches During World War I

The French anti-war film, Joyeux Noel,which was nominated for the 2005 Best Foreign Film Academy Award, gives an insight into life in the trenches during World War I. The film is based on a true event of an improvised Christmas truce during the first year of the war. In December 1914, enemy soldiers, Germans, French and Scots, laid down arms, staggered out of their trenches, and sang carols together on a frigid Christmas Eve.

Suddenly, and entirely accidentally, Christmas Day brought a magical event that would forever sear the history books with a moment of humanity in the midst of bloody battle. The Germans placed Christmas trees above their trench simply to get them out of the way, while Scottish bagpipers played along to the operatic voices they heard wafting over from the German camp. Then, as if by magic, all the men were united in No Man's Land for a festive celebration. The men tentatively made friends, showed each other pictures of faraway lovers, and played soccer across the snowy landscape, all the while knowing that the coming days may find them killing one another.

They were eventually punished, but the film recounts a touching tale of an unlikely, fleeting reconciliation in the midst of bloody battle. The reality before and after that truce was as follows: Early in the war, each side dug one set of trenches. Later soldiers added more trenches which were manned by drafted civilians. Eventually, some armies even boasted of underground towns with kitchens, storage rooms and sleeping quarters.

Historical records recount tales of horror about life in these trenches. In World History, Perspectives of the Past by Krieger, Neill and Jantzen, we learn from a letter by a soldier on the Western Front, that "the men slept in mud, washed in mud, ate mud and dreamed mud." The trenches swarmed with rats and insects. Fresh food was nonexistent. Soldiers lived on canned meat that was often spoiled, bread that as hard as a rock, and limited supplies of drinking water. Between repairing the trenches by day and sentry duty at night, soldiers rarely slept more than an hour or two at a time.

The novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, tells of the war through he eyes of an 18 yr.old German soldier He talks about bombardment in the trenches; where he waits through days of artillery shelling, knowing that an attack will come afterward. He ends "We stop just in time to avoid attacking one another. Night again. We are deadened by the strain-a deadly tension that scrapes along one's spine like a gaped knife. Our legs refuse to move, our hands tremble, and our bodies are a thin skin stretched painfully over repressed madnessSo we shut our teeth-it will end-it willend-perhaps we will come through."

The war dragged on for four years. During these years, new technologies of warfare and the total involvement of citizens and governments made World War I unlike any earlier war.It will be certainly remembered as one where soldiers suffered the most horrific experiences imaginable.

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