Sergeant Eastmond being busy with a working-party. He introduced me to the platoon sergeants, more particularly to Sergeant Eastmond and told him to give me any information I wanted then went back to sleep, asking to be woken at once if anything went wrong. Each company held some two hundred of these, with two platoons in the front line, and two in the support line about a hundred yards back. The battalion frontage was about eight hundred yards. ▲ Main Article ▲ Primary Sources (1) Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929)ĭunn showed me around the line. Despite the use of a high parados in the front-line trenches, it has been estimated that about 75,000 British soldiers in the war were killed by British shells that had been intended for the Germans. Soldiers in the front line would also be hit by their own artillery. One study suggested that one-third of all casualties on the Western Front were killed or wounded while in the trenches.

Almost every day some enemy shells would fall on the trenches.

On one occasion, the 13th Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment spent fifty-one consecutive days in the line.īeing in the front-line was extremely dangerous. It was not uncommon for soldiers to be in the front line trenches for over thirty days at a time.

However, when the army was short of men, soldiers had to spend far longer periods at the front. Another four days were spent in a rest camp that was built a few miles away from the fighting. Each soldier usually spent eight days in the front line and four days in the reserve trench. The British Army worked on a 16 day timetable. Soldiers in the First World War did not spend the whole of the time in the trenches.

Company of heroes 2 trench map