What was warfare like in the trenches

The enemy remained largely hidden from view and soldiers often felt powerless against arbitrary and sudden death. The inability to defend oneself against shelling or snipers, and the constant hardships of trench life, contributed to extreme stress and exhaustion.

Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Canadian soldiers were killed and wounded each day along the Western Front. The infantry and machine-gunners, which took the majority of casualties during the war, planned to lose 10 percent of the total strength each month to death, wounding, and illness.

The killing never stopped on the Western Front. The Battle of Somme as seen from the trenches. Trench warfare caused enormous numbers of casualties. Later in the war, forces began mounting attacks from the trenches at night, usually with support of covering artillery fire. The Germans soon became known for effectively mounting nighttime incursions behind enemy lines, by sending highly trained soldiers to attack the trenches of opposing forces at what they perceived as weak points.

If successful, these soldiers would breach enemy lines and circle around to attack their opponents from the rear, while their comrades would mount a traditional offensive at the front. The brutality of trench warfare is perhaps best typified by the Battle of the Somme in France. British troops suffered 60, casualties on the first day of fighting alone. German soldiers lying dead in a trench after the Battle of Cambrai, With soldiers fighting in close proximity in the trenches, usually in unsanitary conditions, infectious diseases such as dysentery, cholera and typhoid fever were common and spread rapidly.

Trenches in WWI were constructed with sandbags, wooden planks, woven sticks, tangled barbed wire or even just stinking mud. Trenches became trash dumps of the detritus of war: broken ammunition boxes, empty cartridges, torn uniforms, shattered helmets, soiled bandages, shrapnel balls, bone fragments. Trenches were also places of despair, becoming long graves when they collapsed from the weight of the war. They were easy targets and casualties were enormously high. By the end of , after just five months of fighting, the number of dead and wounded exceeded four million men.