What It's Like to be Every Level of WW1 Trench Soldier

Level one, the raw recruit. You were 18

years old. Yesterday you were working in

a factory, punching a clock, eating your

mother's cooking, sleeping in your own

bed. Today you are standing in a muddy

field in France, wearing a uniform that

does not fit, holding a rifle you have

fired exactly three times during basic

training. The sergeant screams in your

face. His breath smells like tobacco and

rage. He calls you maggot. He calls you

worthless. He says you will die in a

week unless you learn to follow orders

without thinking. You believe him.

Everything about him suggests he has

seen things you cannot imagine. Around

you, a thousand other boys stand in

crooked lines. Some of them were clerks.

Some were farmers. Some were students at

university. Their education interrupted

by conscription. Now you are all the

same. You are replacements. Cannon

fodder. The army needs bodies because

the army keeps losing bodies at a rate

the generals did not anticipate. The

train brought you here in cattle cars

packed with men. You could not sit. You

could not sleep. You could barely

breathe. The journey took 3 days. Now

you march. Your boots give you blisters

within the first hour. The leather is

stiff and poorly fitted. No one cares.

You march until your feet bleed. And

then you march some more. At night you

sleep in barns, in fields, in the mud.

The food is terrible. Hard biscuits

called hard attack that can break your

teeth if you bite wrong. and canned beef

that the men call bully beef. It tastes

like metal and salt and despair. The

older soldiers look at you with pity.

They've been where you are going. They

know what is coming. You do not. Level

two, the private. You have reached the

front. The trenches stretch as far as

you can see in both directions.

Zigzagging across the landscape like a

scar that will never heal. They tell you

the western front runs from Switzerland

to the sea. 400 m of ditches filled with

men trying to kill each other. You climb

down into the trench and immediately

step in. 6 in of cold water. This is

your home now. You will live in this

ditch for weeks at a time, rotating

between the front line, the support

trenches, and the reserve. The walls are

reinforced with wooden planks and

sandbags. The floor is duck boards laid

over mud. Wooden slats that sink and

shift under your weight. The mud is

everywhere. It gets into your boots,

your clothes, your food, your soul. Men

have drowned in this mud. Shell holes

fill with water and become death traps.

You learn the daily routine quickly

because learning it keeps you alive.

Stand two at dawn. Every man on the

firestep, bayonet fixed, watching no

man's land for a German attack. The

halflight of dawn is when attacks

usually come. The attack rarely comes,

but you stand ready anyway because the

one time you relax will be the time they

come. Then stand down breakfast, work

parties. You fill sandbags endlessly.

You repair walls damaged by shelling.

You pump out water that seeps in faster

than you can remove it. The rats are

everywhere. They are fat the size of

cats grown huge on the corpses rotting

in no man's land between the lines. At

night they run over your face while you

sleep. You scream the first few times.

You stop screaming after the first week.

The lice are worse. They infest your

uniform, your hair, every crack and

crevice of your body. The itching never

stops. Men scratch until they bleed.

Until their skin is raw and infected.

Trench fever spreads through the ranks.

A mysterious disease carried by the lice

that leaves you weak and shaking. You

get sick. You recover. You get sick

again. This is life now. Level three,

the lance corporal. You survive 3

months. That is enough to make you a

veteran in this war. Men who were here

when you arrived are mostly gone. Dead,

wounded, sick, transferred. The sergeant

pens a single stripe on your sleeve. You

are a lance corporal now. The lowest

rank of leadership. You have four men

under you, a fire team. Your job is to

make sure they do not die stupidly.

Stupid deaths are common. Men who stand

up to stretch and catch a sniper's

bullet. Men who light cigarettes at

night and give away their position. Men

who fall asleep on watch and get their

throats cut by German raiders. You are

responsible for fire discipline. When

the Germans probe your section with

patrols, you decide when to shoot and

when to stay silent. Shooting too early

gives away your position. Shooting too

late means they are already in your

trench. You learn the sounds of the

front, the crack of rifles, the thump of

mortars, the scream of incoming

artillery that means you have about 2

seconds to dive into a dugout before the

world explodes. You learn to tell German

shells from British shells by their

sound. You learn which parts of the

trench are safe and which will get your

head taken off by a sniper if you stand

up at the wrong time. Their periscopes

for looking over the parapit. Use them.

Your men look to you for guidance. Some

of them are older than you. Some were

respectable before the war. Married men

with children. Now they wait for a

teenager to tell them when to sleep and

when to eat. The responsibility weighs

on you. You make mistakes. One of your

men stands up to stretch and a bullet

punches through his skull. You wrote the

letter to his mother. You lied about how

he died. Everyone lies about how they

die. The truth is too ugly. Level four.

The corporal. Another stripe. You are

the second in command of your section

now. 8 to 12 men depending on

casualties. The section is almost never

at full strength. Someone is always dead

or wounded or sick. The section leader,

a sergeant, relies on you to handle the

details. You organize the watch

rotations. You make sure ammunition is

distributed evenly. You inspect rifles

to make sure they are clean because a

dirty rifle jams and a jammed rifle

kills its owner. You lead small patrols

into no man's land at night, crawling

through the wire on your belly,

listening for German voices in the dark.

The wire is everywhere. coils of barbed

wire strung on wooden posts [snorts]

designed to slow attackers while machine

guns cut them down. You learn to cut it

silently. You learn to move through it

without getting tangled. The first time

you kill a man up close, he is as scared

as you are. A German soldier, maybe 19,

caught in the wire during a raid. He

sees you coming and raises his hands.

Surrender. But you have been told not to

take prisoners on raids. They slow you

down. They make noise. They compromise

the mission. You use your bayonet

because a gunshot would bring the whole

German line down on you. It is not like

the training dummies. He struggles. He

grabs at the blade. He makes sounds you

will never forget. The look in his eyes

stays with you. Some nights you see his

face when you close your eyes. He had a

photograph in his pocket. A girl. You

left it with his body. You tell yourself

it was necessary. You tell yourself he

would have done the same to you. Maybe

that is true. You stop thinking about

it. Thinking is dangerous. You focus on

the job. Keep your men alive. Kill the

enemy. Survive until tomorrow. Level

five. The sergeant. You have been

promoted over the bodies of the men who

came before you. The sergeant who

trained you took a piece of shrapnel

through the throat during the

bombardment. You were standing next to

him when it happened. His blood sprayed

across your face. He tried to speak,

tried to give you final orders, but only

gurgling sounds came out. He died in

your arms. Now you are the sergeant. You

run a section of 10 men, sometimes more

when other sections are depleted. You

are the backbone of the company.

Officers come and go. They get killed or

promoted or transferred or invalidated

out with shell shock. The average life

expectancy of a second lieutenant is 6

weeks. NCOs's like you hold everything

together. The captain gives orders. You

make those orders happen. When the order

is stupid, and many orders are stupid,

issued by men who have never seen the

front line, you modify it just enough to

keep your men alive without getting shot

for insubordination. This is the art of

the sergeant. Knowing how far you can

bend, knowing when to push back and when

to shut up. The men respect you because

you have been here longer than any of

them. You have survived four major

attacks and a dozen small ones. You have

been gassed twice and wounded three

times. You must know something they do

not. The truth is you are just lucky.

Skill matters less than luck in the

trenches. A random shell can kill the

best soldier in the army. You have seen

it happen to men far better than you.

But the men need to believe in

something. So you let them believe in

you. You are their father, their priest,

their protector. You accept this role

because someone has to. Level six. The

company sergeant major. The commanding

officer has noticed you. The captain

calls you into his dugout. a hole in the

side of the trench reinforced with

timber and corrugated iron and offers

you promotion. Company sergeant major.

You are now the senior enlisted man in a

company of 200 soldiers, four platoon, a

small army. Your job is to be the bridge

between the officers and the men. The

officers have been educated at expensive

schools. Many of them have never worked

a day in their lives. They speak

differently, think differently, move

through the world with an ease that

comes from wealth and privilege. They do

not understand the common soldier. They

speak a different language. You

translate. When the captain issues an

order, you turn it into something the

men can understand and execute. When the

men have complaints, you filter them and

present them to the captain in a way he

will accept. Complaints about food,

about equipment, about the endless

waiting, about the death all around

them. You handle discipline. When a man

falls asleep on watch, you decide

whether he gets a warning or a court

marshal. Falling asleep on watch can

mean execution. You have that power now.

When supplies arrive, you make sure they

are distributed fairly. Rum rations,

cigarettes, mail from home. When mail

comes, you deliver it personally because

you know how much those letters mean. A

letter from home can save a man's

sanity. You know which men have troubles

at home. Which ones have wives cheating

on them while they rot in the mud, which

ones have received word that their

children are sick or dead. You carry the

emotional weight of 200 men and you

cannot let it crush you. Level seven,

the second lieutenant. The colonel sees

something in you, a natural leader. They

are desperate for officers. The old

aristocratic officer corps has been

decimated by casualties. They need

replacements and they are promoting from

the ranks. They send you to an officer

training course behind the lines. For

six weeks, you sleep in a real bed and

eat hot food. You learn tactics and map

reading and how to walk like a

gentleman. You learn which fork to use

at dinner, as if that matters when

shells are falling. Then they pin a pip

on your shoulder and send you back to

the front as a second lieutenant. You

are in charge of a platoon now. 40 men.

The sergeants who used to be your peers

now salute you. The adjustment is

strange. You know how they talk about

officers when officers are not around.

You used to talk the same way. Now you

are the officer. Your life expectancy is

6 weeks. That is the average for a

second lieutenant on the Western Front.

The Germans target officers. They know

that killing the leaders creates

confusion. Breaks the chain of command.

Snipers look for the telltale signs, the

pistol instead of a rifle, the map case,

the binoculars. The way other men

cluster around you for orders. You paint

over the brass on your uniform to make

yourself less visible. You carry a rifle

instead of a pistol because pistols mark

you as an officer. You try to look like

just another private, but the men still

follow you over the top. When the

whistle blows and you climb the ladder

into no man's land, they climb behind

you. Some of them will not make it to

the German wire. Some of them will die

screaming in shell holes, drowning in

mud, tangled in barbed wire while

machine guns sweep back and forth. You

lead them anyway. It is your job. It is

the job you asked for. Level eight, the

lieutenant. You survived your first 6

months as an officer. You have beaten

the odds. You have been promoted,

Lieutenant. You are now second in

command of the company. When a captain

is killed or wounded or rotated out, you

take over. This happens more often than

anyone planned. Captains die frequently.

The war consumes them. You find yourself

commanding 200 men in the middle of

attacks, making decisions that determine

who lives and who dies. You learn the

brutal calculus of trench warfare. If

you send a patrol into no man's land,

some of them will die, but you will gain

intelligence about German positions. Is

the intelligence worth the lives?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You make

the call and live with the consequences.

You learn to read terrain, to understand

fields of fire, to predict where the

enemy will place their machine guns. You

learn that frontal attacks are suicide.

In flanking attacks are difficult, and

there are no good options, only less bad

ones. The men under you have faces. They

have names. They have families waiting

for them at home. You try not to learn

their names anymore because learning

their names makes it harder when they

die. But you learn them anyway. You

cannot help it. You are still human

despite everything this war has tried to

do to you. Level 9, the captain. You

command a company now. 200 men on paper.

In practice, closer to 150. The gaps are

filled by replacements who arrive green

and terrified and die before you learn

their names. Fresh faces that blur

together. You stop trying to remember

them all months ago. Your job is to hold

a section of the line. A few hundred

yards of mud and wire and death. Not

particularly important, not

strategically significant. But if you

lose it, the men on either side of you

are exposed. So you hold it. You rotate

your platoon through the front line, the

support line, and the reserve. [sighs]

Front line is the worst. Constant

shelling, constant tension that never

lets up. Support line is slightly

better. You repair trenches and carry

supplies forward. Reserve is almost

peaceful. Hot food, sleep, letters home.

You become a logistics expert. You learn

that ammunition matters less than food

and food matters less than water. Men

can fight hungry. They cannot fight

without water. You bribe the

quartermaster to make sure your company

gets enough. Everyone bribes the

quartermaster. It is the unofficial

economy of the war. You write condolence

letters every week. Dear Mrs. Smith.

Your son died bravely in defense of his

country. He did not suffer. He was a

credit to his regiment and his family.

The truth is usually uglier. Your son

was blown apart by a shell while eating

breakfast. Your son drowned in mud

within sight of our lines and we could

not reach him. Your son shot himself

because he could not take it anymore.

You did not write those truths. No one

does. The lies are kinder. Level 10, the

major. You have been promoted to

battalion staff. You are the second in

command of a battalion now. 800 men,

four companies. Your job is to make sure

everything runs smoothly. Supplies,

communications, coordination with

artillery. You spend less time in the

frontline trenches and more time in

headquarters dugouts, staring at maps

and writing reports. You hate it. You

miss the simplicity of the line. In the

trenches, you knew who was trying to

kill you. The enemy was in front of you.

Here at headquarters, the danger is more

subtle. Colonels who want scapegoats for

failed attacks. Generals who demand

impossible objectives and blame you when

reality intrudes. Other majors competing

for limited promotions. The politics are

exhausting. You learn to play the game.

You learn to phrase reports so that

failures sound like partial successes.

You learn to blame unavoidable factors,

the weather, the terrain, unexpected

enemy reinforcements, rather than

admitting that the plan was flawed from

the beginning. This is how you survive

as a staff officer. You spend hours on

the telephone coordinating artillery

barges. You schedule attacks down to the

minute. You calculate how many shells

will fall on each art of enemy trench.

The war has become a machine, an

industrial process, and you have become

a technician. The romance is gone. There

is only the grind. Level 11, the

lieutenant colonel. You command a

battalion now. 800 men if you are at

full strength. You rarely are.

Casualties bleed the unit constantly.

Your job is to execute the orders given

by brigade headquarters. Those orders

come from generals who have never seen

the front line. Who live in chataus

miles behind the fighting, who drink

wine while your men drown in mud. They

look at maps and draw arrows and expect

you to turn arrows into reality.

Sometimes the orders make sense. A

limited attack on a weakened position. A

raid to gather intelligence. Sometimes

they demand you attack fortified

positions across open ground with no

artillery support because the shells

have been allocated elsewhere. You

follow the orders anyway. Refusing means

court marshal. Complaining too loudly

means removal from command and the next

commander might be even worse. You might

at least save a few lives with your

modifications. You modify what you can.

You delay when possible. You argue in

planning meetings, pointing out the

flaws, the impossibilities, the certain

casualties. The generals nod politely

and tell you to proceed. Your battalion

takes 40% casualties. You write the

report. You attend the next meeting. The

cycle repeats. You drink more than you

should. You sleep less than you need.

You develop a twitch in your left eye

that never quite goes away. Level 12.

The colonel. You command a regiment now.

2 to 3,000 men. You are no longer close

to the fighting. You are too valuable to

risk in the front lines. too senior to

be wasted on a sniper's bullet. Your job

is to coordinate the battalions under

your command to make sure they work

together to allocate reserves where they

are needed most. You have a staff of

dozens, agitants and aids and

specialists for everything from signals

to supply to medical evacuation. You

live in a headquarters several miles

behind the front. You can hear the guns,

a constant rumble like distant thunder,

but you do not feel the shells. You read

reports. Casualties

127. Casualties 89, casualties 203. The

numbers lose meaning. You cannot think

about each one as a person or you will

go mad. They become statistics. Units

become percentages of fighting strength.

A battalion at 60% is still combat

effective. A battalion at 40% needs to

be pulled back and rebuilt. You make

these calculations coldly because cold

calculation is what the job requires.

Emotion is a luxury you cannot afford.

But sometimes late at night when you are

alone in your quarters with a bottle of

whiskey, you remember what it was like

to be a private in the trenches. You

remember the faces of men who died under

your command. Men whose names you still

know. You pour yourself another drink

and stare at the wall. Then you go back

to work. There is always more work.

Level 13. The brigadier general. You

have left the trenches behind entirely.

You command a brigade now. Four to 6,000

men, three or four regiments. Your world

is meetings and reports and telephone

calls. You argue with other generals

about artillery allocation. You study

maps and try to predict where the

Germans will attack next. You plan

offensives that will consume thousands

of lives. The men who will die in those

offensives are abstractions to you now.

You do not see them. You see unit

markers on a map. Blue rectangles and

red rectangles. Move this rectangle

here. Attack with that rectangle there.

The rectangles bleed and scream and

drown in mud, but you do not hear them.

You cannot. The distance between your

headquarters and the front line is only

a few miles, but it might as well be a

thousand. You are fighting a different

war. The war of resources and logistics

and railway timets. The war of politics

and public opinion and newspaper

headlines. If your attacks succeed, you

receive medals and praise, mentions and

dispatches, perhaps a title after the

war. If they fail, you receive polite

criticism and a transfer to a quieter

sector. No one shoots you for failure.

No one sentences you to die. You are

protected by rank in a way the private

can never be. You are insulated from

consequences.

Sometimes you visit the front. You walk

through trenches that have been cleaned

up for your arrival. The bodies removed,

the worst of the filth scraped away. Men

salute you. Officers brief you on

conditions. They tell you what they

think you want to hear. You nod and ask

questions and then return to your

headquarters, satisfied that you

understand the situation. You do not

understand. You cannot. The gulf between

your experience and theirs is

unbridgegible now. You started this war

as a recruit in the mud. You remember

the rats. You remember the lice. You

remember the fear. Now you ended as a

general in a chateau, signing orders

that kill men who remind you of who you

used to be. That is the ark of military

life. You survive long enough to send

others to die. And when the war finally

ends, when the guns fall silent and the

armistice is signed, you will return

home a hero. You will attend parades and

receive honors. You will shake hands

with politicians who never heard a shot

fired. No one will ask about the men who

did not return. No one will remember

their names. They will be statistics and

history books, numbers without faces.

You will carry them with you forever, a

weight that does not show in

photographs, a debt that can never be

repaid. This is what victory looks like.

This is the cost. You survived. You

rose. You commanded. And somewhere along

the way, you became exactly the kind of

general you once despised. That is the

final lesson of war. It changes

everyone. Even the survivors. especially

the survivors.