Digging In

Following the so-called Miracle on the Marne in the first week of September 1914, confidence was hubristically high among British commanders in France that the thirty miles or so which the army had advanced within the space of a week could be repeated with a series of swift attacks, keeping the Germans in disarray, driving them out of France by the end of the month and all the way back through Belgium by Christmas. They hadn't reckoned with the fact that their German counterparts had now resigned themselves to fighting a war on two fronts, and had therefore instructed a couple of million Teutonic troops to entrench themselves along the line of the River Aisne, with no further intentions of attacking into France, but determined to hold the ground they'd gained in the opening months of the war whatever the cost.

The First Battle of the Aisne was the point when the Great War first began to take on the characteristics most commonly associated with it - trenches, no man's land, futile frontal attacks against fortified machine-gun positions - and ordinary Tommies thus recorded the things which would later become monotonous and horrific to them with a sense of astonishment and even wonder, seeing a whole new aspect to conflict after the brutal crucible of the Marne. Diaries of the time reveal a spirit of improvisation (the BEF hadn't been equipped with entrenching tools, and were forced to scavenge and requisition spades from local towns), an odd delight at being able to stay in one place and "rest" even in such deadly circumstances (one soldier records the joy of getting properly undressed for the first time in ten days, and even writes home to request a pair of pyjamas be sent to the front for him), and of course, the relentless grinding of the rumour mill. There was talk of Canadians and Russians heading to the front, and of French colonial troops crawling across no man's land into German lines in the middle of the night, returning with severed ears and decapitated heads as trophies. There was also the steady realisation that the opportunity for a total rout of the German army had been and gone. The war had, more literally than any other conflict in history, been fought to a standstill, and the combatants knew it.

And so, life became a routine of breakfast artillery barrages (euphemistically referred to as receiving "cards from Whistling Willie"), the excitement of new tobacco rations (two-ounce tins of Capstan, with the occasional luxury of Virginian cigarettes), the first mail from back home, the clearing of waterlogged trenches as autumn's first downpours arrived, and of course, the sporadic deaths - often caused by sheer bad luck - from which the mind-numbing minutiae could never quite provide enough distraction.