The First World War

by John Keegan

In the west, by contrast, no man’s land was usually two to three hundred yards wide, often less, in places only twenty-five. Intense trench fighting could even produce an “international” barbed wire barrier, mended by both sides. Barbed wire had become plentiful by the spring of 1915, though entanglements, strung on wooden posts, later on screw pickets which could be fixed without noisy hammering, were still quite narrow. The dense belts fifty yards deep were a development of later years. To the rear of the front line, the British made a practice of digging a “support” line, separated from the first by two hundred yards and usually a sketchier “reserve” line four hundred yards further back. Connecting these lines, and kinked also by traverses, ran “communication” trenches which allowed reliefs and ration parties to reach the front under cover, all the way from the rear. Diagrammatically, the layout would have appeared quite familiar to any siege engineer of the eighteenth century: “parallels,” connected by saps.2 Any diagrammatic neatness, however, quickly disappeared, as trenches were abandoned because of flooding, exposure to enemy view, or loss to the enemy in combat.