In France the trenches ran through towns and villages, through industrial works, coalmines, brickyards, across railway tracks, through farms, fields and woods, across rivers, canals and streams. In parts of Italy, trenches were dug in rock in Palestine in desert. At Ypres in Belgium the ground is naturally boggy and the water table very high, so trenches were not really dug, but more built up using sandbags and wood (these were called РІР‚ВbreastworksРІР‚в„ў). The trench sides will crumble easily after rain, so would be built up (РІР‚ВrevettedРІР‚в„ў) with wood, sandbags or any other suitable material. For example, in the area of the River Somme in FranceР’В the ground is chalky and is easily dug. The type and nature of the trench positions varied a lot, depending on the local conditions. ByР’В November 1914 there was a continuous line of trenches covering some 400 miles from Switzerland to the North Sea. The massive armies ofР’В both sides dug in to take cover and hold their ground. Before and after those dates were wars of movement: in between it was a war of entrenchment. Trench warfare of the First World War can be said to have begun in September 1914 and ended when the Allies made a breakthrough attack that began in late JulyР’В 1918. It had been widely practiced in the US Civil War, the Russian-Japanese war and other fairly recent wars. The idea of digging into the ground to give some protection from powerful enemy artillery and small arms fire was not a new idea or unique to the Great War. The trenches were the domain of the infantry, with the supporting arms of the mortars and machine-guns, the engineers, the medics and the forward positions of the artillery observers. But behind them was a mass of supply lines, training establishments, stores, workshops, headquarters and all the other elements of the 1914-1918 system of war, in which the majority of troops were employed. The trenches were the front lines: the most dangerous places. Although most of us think primarily of the Great War in terms of life and death in the trenches, only a relatively small proportion of the army actually served there.

Long war officers