Enlisted men had a life expectancy at the front of about two weeks. Officers faced even greater risks: 20 percent of the men who held commissions and who served at the Front were killed, compared to a 10-12 percent death rate among enlisted men in combat units. Many privates felt a bond of shared experience with officers with whom they served in the trenches, and whom they followed whatever the dangers (Winter 147).

"The company of the dead

The front-line soldiers of 1914-18 saw things that people should not see. Among them were hideously wounded men. . . . The butchery of battle was worsened by the development of artillery, which could literally tear a man to pieces, even at times without leaving a single trace of his existence. . . . In previous wars battles had lasted a few days at most. They had had a beginning and an end, after which the dead of both sides, usually as complete bodies, were buried. But this war was different; combat went on for months; artillery fire dismembered men in a flash; and the front line hardly moved at all. Consequently, the line of trenches stretching from Switzerland to the English Channel was littered with the remains of perhaps one million men. Soldiers ate with the dead, made jokes about them, and rifled thier possessions" (Winter 145-46).

The Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest battle in history: 1,200,000 French, British, and German soldiers killed. The German soldiers were issued the order that no ground was to be surrendered to the Allies and that any ground lost was to be regained without delay. von Below's Second Army launched 330 distinct attacks and counter-attacks against the British and the French on the Somme.

One man who lived to write about his experiences, Henri Barbusse, remembered being continually woken up by the sickening odour of men's feet as they marched down the trench, past his head. But predominantly it was a smell of putrefaction. One British private said that his "overriding memory of all his time on the Western Front was the smell." Another in his diary, spoke of a "penetrating and filthy stench . . . a combination of mildew, rotting vegetation and the stink which rises from the decomposing bodies of men and animals" (Winter).

Winter, J.M. The Experience of World War I. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.