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READ MORE: Life in the Trenches of World War I There were three different types of trenches: firing trenches, lined on the side facing the enemy by steps where defending soldiers would stand to fire machine guns and throw grenades at the advancing offense communication trenches and “saps,” shallower positions that extended into no-man’s-land and afforded spots for observation posts, grenade-throwing and machine gun-firing. A well-built trench did not run straight for any distance, as that would invite the danger of enfilade, or sweeping fire, along a long stretch of the line instead it zigzagged every few yards. In total the trenches built during World War I, laid end-to-end, would stretch some 35,000 miles-12,000 of those miles occupied by the Allies, and the rest by the Central Powers.Īs historian Paul Fussell describes it, there were usually three lines of trenches: a front-line trench located 50 yards to a mile from its enemy counterpart, guarded by tangled lines of barbed wire a support trench line several hundred yards back and a reserve line several hundred yards behind that. Mihiel and Nancy, the system finally reached its southernmost point in Alsace, at the Swiss border. Running in front of such French towns as Soissons, Reims, Verdun, St. The trench system on the Western Front in World War I-fixed from the winter of 1914 to the spring of 1918-eventually stretched from the North Sea coast of Belgium southward through France, with a bulge outwards to contain the much-contested Ypres salient. In the wake of the Battle of the Marne-during which Allied troops halted the steady German push through Belgium and France that had proceeded over the first month of World War I-a conflict both sides had expected to be short and decisive turns longer and bloodier, as Allied and German forces begin digging the first trenches on the Western Front on September 15, 1914.
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