The Ross Playfair Letters Project

Bitter weather slowed down the body lice that afflicted most soldiers — and warmer conditions revived them again. Within days of coming to France, most men, even officers, began what Gordon Beatty recalled as “a never-ending battle with cooties.” ... “You know how much I hate mosquito bites,” Lieutenant Claude Williams reminded his mother, “well these are about twice as bad and hardly a square inch of you is left untouched.” Body-lice or pediculis corpori, burrowed into the seams of shirts and underwear, in the folds of kilts, or under the knee of the tightly laced breeches worn by cavalry and gunners; nits or phthirius pubis, crowded under the patch of linen at the crotch of army trousers. Head-lice became so annoying to some men that they shaved themselves bald. Wherever they were, lice caused a continuous and almost indescribable misery. ... Desperate men stripped naked even in bitter weather to attack their torturers. ... Veterans recommended scores of solutions — Keating’s Powder, creosote, cheesecloth underwear, or, as Colonel Lionel Page recommended, no underwear at all.

Will Bird favoured Zambuk, a liniment more commonly used on stiff joints. Soldiers spent their spare time half-naked, “chatting” or “crumbing” — burning lice by running a lighted candle along a shirt seam and listening for the gratifying “pop.” Many woke to find blood seeping from the gashes left by unconscious scratching overnight. In the filthy conditions, infection soon followed. (Morton, 139–40)

• “Of Lice and Men: Trench Fever and Trench Life in the AIF” by Dr. M. G. Miller
• “The Louse,”; extract from the book The Minor Horrors of War by A. F. Shipley
• « Of Lice and Men: Trench Fever and Trench Life in the AIF » par le Dr M. G. Miller
• « The Louse », extrait du livre The Minor Horrors of War par A. F. Shipley

...warfare in which opposing armed forces attack, counterattack, and defend from relatively permanent systems of trenches dug into the ground. The opposing systems of trenches are usually close to one another. Trench warfare is resorted to when the superior firepower of the defense compels the opposing forces to “dig in” so extensively as to sacrifice their mobility in order to gain protection.

... In making a trench, soil from the excavation is used to create raised parapets running both in front of and behind the trench. Within the trench are firing positions along a raised forward step called a fire step, and duckboards are placed on the often muddy bottom of the trench to provide secure footing.

...

Trench warfare reached its highest development on the Western Front during World War I (1914–18), when armies of millions of men faced each other in a line of trenches extending from the Belgian coast through northeastern France to Switzerland. These trenches arose within the first few months of the war’s outbreak, after the great offensives launched by Germany and France had shattered against the deadly, withering fire of the machine gun and the rapid-firing artillery piece. The sheer quantity of bullets and shells flying through the air in the battle conditions of that war compelled soldiers to burrow into the soil to obtain shelter and survive.

The typical trench system in World War I consisted of a series of two, three, four, or more trench lines running parallel to each other and being at least 1 mile (1.6 km) in depth [sic]. Each trench was dug in a type of zigzag so that no enemy, standing at one end, could fire for more than a few yards down its length. Each of the main lines of trenches was connected to each other and to the rear by a series of communications trenches that were dug roughly perpendicular to them. Food, ammunition, fresh troops, mail, and orders were delivered through these trenches. The intricate network of trenches contained command posts, forward supply dumps, first-aid stations, kitchens, and latrines. Most importantly, it had machine -gun emplacements to defend against an assault, and it had dugouts deep enough to shelter large number of defending troops during an enemy bombardment.

• “Dugouts,” Spartacus Educational website
• diagram of a trench at SchoolHistory website
• “Trench Warfare,” Wikipedia
• diagrams and more information on trench warfare at Spartacus Educational website
• Bairnsfather cartoon “The Communication Trench” (from More Fragments from France, vol. 2, p. 25)
• Bairnsfather cartoon “The New Submarine Danger” (from More Fragments from France, vol. 2, p. 37)
• Bairnsfather cartoon “Those Tubular Trenches” (from More Fragments from France, vol. 2, p. 43) showing HQ in a dugout
• Bairnsfather cartoon “What time do they feed the sealions, Alf” (from More Fragments from France, vol. 2, front cover)
• Bairnsfather cartoon "My Dug-Out" (from Fragments from France, p. 4)