Living Conditions in the Trenches

Given the unique nature of fighting in the trenches during the Great War, and the extreme living conditions for the soldiers, it goes without saying that many poets at this time took inspiration from their surroundings in their writing. This was a way of informing the public which remained back in England and which had no idea of what the fighting troops were really going through.

The weather obviously played an important part in the lives of the soldiers in the trenches, living constantly, as they did, in the filth of the wet mud and exposed to freezing conditions in winter. The allied soldiers, who did not have the advantage of higher and drier ground that the Germans occupied, suffered the most and many men fell prey to the rigours of the climate. An anonymous short verse clearly captures such conditions:

There’s a little wet home in the trench,

That the rain storms continually drench,

A dead cow close by, with her hooves in the sky,

And she gives off a beautiful stench.

Amid the corpses of men and animals, and in the filth of the trenches, it is not surprising that an ideal breeding ground was created for vermin. Rats and lice thrived, and again seemed to have played such a dominant role in the events of the war as to merit a not insignificant amount of attention in some writings.

The title of the poem, “Louse Hunting”, for example, speaks for itself as the poet Isaac Rosenberg describes the regular routine of burning infected garments, whilst in “The Immortals”, he tells of the futility of trying to be rid of these pests: “I killed them, but they would not die”. The more he tries to kill them, the more they seem to appear from nowhere, until the narrator can only conclude,

I used to think the Devil hid

In women’s smiles and wine’s carouse.

I called him Satan, Balzebub.

But now I call him, dirty louse.