Environments of Death Trench Warfare on the Western Front, 1914–18

Environments of Death: Trench Warfare on the Western Front, 1914–18

Redefining Space: Landscape vs. Environment

• Landscape:
  • Early modern conception: Property (Landschaft).
  • Modern understanding: Object of visual representation.
  • Natural terrain with cultural relations and an observer reflecting on the scenery.
  • Primarily an aesthetic space meant to be seen, framed, or viewed from a physical eminence.
• Environment:
  • More than visual; it's where one lives.
  • Consists of physical structures, natural and man-made phenomena, and atmospheric conditions.
  • Essential for the existence of living organisms.
  • Lived-in areas demanding immediate engagement of the senses (sight, sound, smell, touch).
  • Environments acculturate nature.
  • Characterized by the direct impact of nonhuman physical forces on people’s experience.
• Distinction:
  • Landscape acts to naturalize what is deeply cultural, while environments serve to acculturate nature.
  • People can live without landscape but cannot survive without an environment.
  • The distinction illuminates the changing relationship between humans and the physical environment during war.

Transformation of Landscape into an Environment of War

• Environments of war cease to be merely landscapes; they become spaces of combat.
• War revolves around the conquest of territory, achievable only through active engagement with the environment.
• Environmental factors shaped the daily practice of warfare and soldiers’ perceptions.
• Soldiers exposed to enemy armies and natural hazards.
• Environmental conditions exacerbated the miseries of combat.
• World War I initiated a new era of warfare due to the convergence of men, technology, and the environment resulting in unprecedented deadly force of modern mass warfare.

Scholarly Neglect of the Environment in Warfare

• Environmental historians have paid little attention to warfare.
• Military historians rarely study the environmental aspects of war.
• Studies of everyday life in the trenches often describe environmental conditions but treat the environment as merely the backdrop.
• Histories of the creative imagination and memory of war often fail to distinguish between environment, nature, and landscape.

The Reality of Warfare

• Analyzes the reality of warfare and the transformation of abstract notions about defending a nation into the dirty reality of combat.
• Characterized by an expanding environment of death and destruction, not heroic landscapes and battles.

Going to War in 1914

• More than nine million men mobilized in August 1914.
• Millions of animals, mainly horses, also sent to the front.
• Wars usually break out in spring or summer due to favorable weather conditions aiding troop movement and planning.
• Initial enthusiasm for war (Kriegsbegeisterung) partly due to the conviction that the war would be short and fought in fair weather.
• Soldiers' thoughts were diverse, ranging from viewing it as a vacation to an outdoor adventure.
• Battlefields determined by weather conditions, topographical features, tactical considerations, and strategic imperatives.
• Early war of movement saw German armies marching towards Paris at a pace of 20-30 kilometers a day.
• Going to war was a physically taxing ordeal, not a romantic outdoor exploit.
• Soldiers experienced firsthand how landscapes of peace became environments of war.

Landscapes of Entrenchment

• Trench warfare became synonymous with the western front, though not invented in WWI.
• First trenches dug in September 1914 as a transitory phenomenon.
• Over four years, trenches developed into a network over 500 kilometers long, from the Swiss border to the Baltic Sea.
• Location depended on enemy position and topography; flat fields of Flanders favorable for trench building.
• Each country developed a distinct style of trench building; British and German trenches became increasingly complex.
• Trenches expanded into multisector systems with firing, support, and reserve lines linked by communication trenches.
• German trenches contained multiple levels of dugouts, sometimes descending ten meters below the surface.
• Trench walls reinforced with wooden planks.
• Trenches remained provisional due to the threat of destruction by enemy artillery.
• A tour in the firing trenches lasted three to five days, but sometimes weeks.
• Daily life reduced to manning weapons, maintaining trenches, and going over the top.
• Life alternated between excitement and boredom, and soldiers lived in the dirt.
• Conditions did not lend themselves to a chivalrous existence.
• Soldiers spent time repairing trenches, mostly at night.
• Building and maintaining trenches required considerable natural resources, especially wood, leading to deforestation.

Spatiality of Trenches

• Entrenchment created a new spatiality above and below ground, changing the conduct and experience of war.
• Battlefields no longer offered a panoramic view; generals rarely saw the front lines, creating a rift between strategies and tactics.
• Battlefields became landscapes transposed onto maps for commanders.
• Soldiers were sent "over the top" into "no-man’s-land," a cratered arena of destruction between opposing lines.
• The living had to stay hidden below ground, while corpses claimed the space above ground.
• New technologies, including machine guns, artillery, airplanes, flamethrowers, tanks, and poison gases, caused this reversal of space.
• The increased range of weapons turned front lines into battle zones several kilometers wide, reaching underground and into the sky.
• Warfare included the obliteration of entire landscapes.
• Heavy artillery gouged and cratered the earth, destroying soldiers, animals, trees, and communication lines.
• Aircraft offered a new panoramic view of the battlefield from above.
• Soldiers were forced further below ground to be less visible.
• Humans were subordinated to the environment, blending in with the landscape.
• Military uniforms adopted subdued earth tones for camouflage.
• Helmets were redesigned for trench warfare.

Perceptions in an Environment of War

• Trench warfare forced soldiers to develop a new relationship with space, including intensified sense perceptions.
• Little to see due to military destruction and soldiers spending time close to or below ground.
• Battlefields looked empty despite being saturated with bodies.
• View obstructed by barbed wire and upturned earth.
• Sounds took on greater significance in the absence of sight.
• Soldiers interpreted sounds as indicators of danger.
• The noise of barrages, known as Trommelfeuer, was intense and could be heard kilometers away.
• Soldiers learned to differentiate among sounds and tolerate constant barrages.
• The stench was overpowering due to unhygienic conditions at the front lines and the smell of death.
• Decaying human and animal flesh contributed to the effervescing stench.
• Survival depended on filtering out some sensory impressions while remaining hypersensitive to others.
• Soldiers unable to regulate their senses were more likely to develop shell shock.
• The environment of the western front unhinged conventional notions of order and conceptions of space.
• World War I turned into a total war, experienced as all-consuming due to the total destruction caused by warfare against everything.

Altered Composition of the Land

• The scenic landscapes of the western front had disappeared by November 1914.
• Vegetation disappeared and was replaced by a mixture of soil, body parts, and military debris.
• Soldiers lost their sense of direction in the maze of trenches and torn-up earth.
• Trench warfare required new markers for orientation, such as "Left by the coil of wire, right by the French legs."
• The western front gave rise to an environment where men, animals, machines, trees, and the earth were reconfigured into an unrecognizable landscape of total destruction.
• Death became visible while the living had to stay hidden in order to survive.
• The war provided the first image of the total destruction of landscape and the unlimited dominance of technology over nature and space.
• Humans were subordinated to natural forces and subjected to the unintended consequences of environmental destruction.

Belligerent Environments

• Enemy fire was not the only wartime threat; soldiers also had to deal with changing weather conditions.
• Each season brought its own set of hazards—snow and freezing temperatures in the winter; heat, mosquitoes, and stench in the summer.
• The incessant rainfall transformed the front into a sea of mud.
• Rain and mud were constant complaints in letters and front-line press.
• During heavy downpours, soldiers spent much of their time pumping water and mud out of the trenches.
• Torrential rains affected battles, delaying offensives and making shooting impossible.
• Mud contributed to the hazards of front life, weighing down soldiers and contributing to trench foot.
• Vermin, most notably lice and rats, were omnipresent.
• Weather conditions and vermin had always been a part of war to some degree.
• Vermin pointed to the environmental consequences of stalemate warfare, which offered favorable conditions for rats and lice.
• Vermin intensified soldiers’ everyday misery, heightening the sense that civilization was coming to an end.
• Soldiers spent much of their time "chatting" (picking lice), a rather futile task.
• Rats infested their surroundings, providing ideal habitats in the trenches.
• Rats thrived and multiplied, feeding on food rations and corpses.
• Enemy fire kept rat populations in check.
• Gas could cause panic among rat populations, serving as an early warning of an impending attack.
• Vermin posed direct threats to soldiers’ health.
• Lice spread the bacterium that causes typhus.
• Rats carried diseases that could be spread to humans.
• Damp conditions and poor hygiene increased soldiers’ susceptibility to viral and bacterial infections.
• Trench foot occurred due to prolonged standing in cold water or mud.
• A new form of trench fever emerged in 1915.
• Influenza began to spread at the front in 1917.

Chemical Warfare

• On April 22, 1915, Germans launched the first successful chemical-weapons attack, deploying more than 160 tons of chlorine gas.
• This marked a turning point in the history of military technology and inaugurated a type of warfare in which the environment itself could become a lethal weapon.
• Poison gas destroyed an adversary from the inside out.
• All sides resorted to the use of poison gas.
• The number of gas shells rose from 1 percent of all fired shells in 1916 to 30 percent by 1918 in some sectors of the front.
• The primary purpose of using gas was to terrorize the enemy.
• Gas unleashed its yellow or greenish clouds, blinding and suffocating soldiers en masse.
• Gas was harmful not only to humans but to every living creature.
• Gas represented a new weapons technology that altered the environment to make it uninhabitable.
• Machine-age warfare incorporated the environment into destruction.
• Weapons functioned only if the environment cooperated.
• Innovations in military technology led to a type of destruction that no longer focused exclusively on killing soldiers but aimed at the indiscriminate and total annihilation of everything.

Conclusion

• By November 1918, four million men had been killed, and millions more were disabled or disfigured.
• At the Battle of the Somme alone, France lost every third soldier.
• Millions of animals were killed.
• Villages and towns lay in ruins, fields had been turned into moonscapes, and forests had been reduced to acres of stumps.
• The conflict had imposed its own set of war-specific environmental conditions.
• The western front gave rise to a distinct environment of trenches and no-man’s-land filled with the intense sounds, sights, and smells of a war of attrition.
• The death of soldiers was closely tied to the death of nature.
• War created a new Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of fate) between men and nature.
• A forest is a Volk. A shot-up forest is an assassinated Volk.
• The fate of this forest is linked and interwoven with my own at the deepest level.