Trench Warfare In The Trenches Essay

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Trench warfare was introduced in order to bring a barrier between forces. They were dug by soldiers and were very lengthy, but very cramped. Soldiers crouched down for extended periods of time to keep their heads blocked from being a target for the other side. They sat their watching their friends die from disease and from being shot, bombed, or poison gassed while they waited to fire their weapons at the enemy.
Most of World War One’s fighting took place in trenches. According to www.wwi.lib.byu.edu, fighting trenches varied anywhere from thirty meters apart to a few hundred meters apart from each other. Trenches were used as protective barriers that covered soldiers and prevented them from being shoot. If a soldier were to come out of a …show more content…

With rainwater comes mud, which made it hard for soldiers to keep their legs and feet dry since they were basically submerged in around three meters of mud. Soldiers would easily get trench foot, which eventually made your foot rot off of your body. It is difficult to imagine just how bad these trenches smelt and how bad they were to live in. Awful odors would often attract rats that could grow larger than a domestic cat according to www.bbc.co.uk. With rats, lice, and other rodents come diseases like trench fever, which required around three months to recover from, however for most soldiers three months was too long to long to go without fighting and most would have died from trench fever.
Infantries could spend months in a disease ridden, rodent infested trench. With watching your fellow soldiers die of disease, have their limbs rot off, and bombed many soldiers that survived ended up developing post traumatic stress disorder, which would not have been treated or diagnosed for many years following the war. Survivors would most likely have many health problems to try to fix after the war ended in 1918. Trench warfare was created to help protect soldiers, but with disease and the harsh conditions of the trenches it may have harmed the soldiers more than helping

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