YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO LIFE IN THE TRENCHES DAILY LIFE
“Nearer and nearer creeps this terrible inferno which only ends in death. May it come quick and mercifully.” So wrote Sergeant Horace Reginald Stanley in his diary while serving at Ypres in 1915. “Some poor wretch has the side of his skull blown away and it is obvious nothing can be done for him. Oh the horror of it all.”
Sergeant Stanley's testimony remains a shocking, uncomfortable read – even from the distance of 108 years. Yet there was nothing particularly extraordinary about it. For countless soldiers – eating, sleeping, fighting and often dying at the edge of no-man's land – such horrors would have been all-too familiar. Trench warfare is surely the defining characteristic of World War I. As anyone who's watched or will attest, when we think of the 1914-18 conflict, our minds invariably
