Muddy Hell: The realities of the Western Front conflict landscape during the Great War

Muddy Hell: The realities of the Western Front conflict landscape during the Great War
The intense and mechanical destruction of Belgium and Northern France in the First World War created a new and terrifying landscape that had hitherto only ever been imagined or seen in medieval visions of hell: one of mud and death unlike anything ever seen before. Saunders describes the landscape of the Western Front as an artefact, the product of human activity and not a natural process (Saunders 2004: 6). 

The resultant Mudscape became the landscape in which the war was fought and lived and a major part of the material culture of the war. A multi-disciplinary study of this material culture makes it possible both to understand the war in greater detail and to see the depth to which mud affected the conflict and the way it was fought. Almost every painting, photograph, poem, diary or book about the First World War involves mud. It is as much a part of the war as artillery or trenches, barbed wire or machine guns, hopelessness or heroism. Yet mud as material culture from the war does not exist for modern day observers, except in the literature and imagery of the time.

 One can visit museums and see tanks, guns, bullets, uniforms and so on. It is even possible to visit old trenches on the battlegrounds of Europe and beyond, but there are no museums of mud. It is not possible to see the mud as it was lived in and fought in and died in. the old battlefields are today either still off limits to the public or largely returned to farmland and rebuilt to their former towns and villages. Therefore the role of mud in the Great War is often overlooked, taken for granted and not fully understood.

This essay will explore the nature of the landscape of the Western Front: the Mudscape that was home to millions of men. Landscape conducts memory and identity as well as any other piece of material culture from the First World War. It had a social life of its own and was well remembered by the soldiers of the Great War. John Masters describes a Second World War battlefield in Burma thus, “The Deep sector looked like Passchendaele – blasted trees, feet and twisted hands sticking up out of the earth, bloody shirts, ammunition clips, holes half full of water, each containing two pale, huge eyed men, trying to keep their rifles out of the mud, and over all the heavy, sweet stench of death…” (Masters 1961: 245), These references to the hell of the Great War by the soldiers of The Second World War (See Arthur 2005: 368, 406) are common, showing not only that the landscape of the First War lived long in the common memory, but also that landscape is a common object to those that fight in it, through all conflict.

When looking at the battlefields of the Western Front today, it is almost impossible to imagine what they would have been like during the Great War. The corpses and detritus of war have long been cleared away or buried, the screeching noise of battle has been replaced by calming countryside tones and the pleasant country air has banished the stench of war. But the immediately obvious difference between the landscape of Northern France and Belgium today, and that of 1914-1918, is the colour. Today the fields are bright yellows, greens and reds, the colour of life and crops and poppies. During the Great War the colour was brown, grey and dead. The mud of the Great War was the remnants of human beings and of murdered nature, the by-product of modern industrial warfare fought on a scale that had never before been thought possible. It is not the same mud we know of today.

The trenches of the Western Front were always “muddy”, even when it was dry. In Flanders the landscape is predominantly flat and the water table is high. Even in summer after only a few feet of digging the water appears (Corrigan 2003: 95) and summer rainfall is not uncommon in France. Further, the mud was not just wet earth, but a combination of many of the unpleasantnesses of war. In the dry men still bled and vomited and defecated and urinated, water and food were still spilt in the trenches and the earth contained the remains of thousands of rotting corpses. Back in England the realties of this world were simply not portrayed in the early years of the war. Take for example the exhibition trenches in Kensington Gardens: “clean, dry and well furnished, with straight sides and sandbags neatly aligned” (Fussell 1977: 43). Wilfred Owen referred to them as “the laughing stock of the British army” (Fussell 1977: 43). It was a far cry from the realities of life at the front.

 The squalid nature of the British trenches was neither imagined nor understood on the home front, but as the war progressed the reality did occasionally seep out. A Daily Mirror headline in late 1917 for example, accompanied by Warwick Brooke’s photograph (Fig 1), read: “That Eternal Mud – Flanders: One Vast Quagmire” (Liddle 1997: 384); but such descriptions of the front were rare.

This lack of understanding contributed to the disorientation of British troops arriving in France and Belgium: having trained for war in the sterile environments of Salisbury Plain and other simulated battlegrounds, they were simply not prepared for the world in which they found themselves. The reality was that there was an enemy other than the Germans: the “Slimescape” of the frontlines (Das 2005: 39). Das uses this term to describe the Front as a combination of mud and slime, a Landscape created by modern industrial weaponry, consisting of the pre-war (and indeed prehistoric) landscape of the front lines and the various detritus of war. It rapidly became apparent to new arrivals in the trenches that surviving the onslaught of the landscape would be as challenging as surviving the weaponry of the enemy.

For the Allies life in the trenches was far worse than for the Germans. The excavations for the A19 Project at Ypres highlight the distinctions between the trenches of the two sides (Saunders et al 2009: 251-266). German trenches were usually built to a much higher standard than the Allied ones: Wattle work, corrugated iron, heavy wooden beams and concrete were all widely used to build the trenches securely and make them resilient to the weather and the mud (Saunders et al 2009: 254). Often German trenches were even described as comfortable, with electricity, kitchens and beds (Fussell 1977: 44). Junger refers to the German trenches as “Dugouts, that have evolved by now from rudimentary holes in the ground to proper enclosed living quarters, with beamed ceilings and plank-cladded walls” (Junger 1961: 41).

Conversely Allied trenches were usually temporary in nature, squalid, badly drained and ill supported against cave in and damage. The front lines sometimes consisted only of shell holes in areas where the trenches had disappeared under bombardment or the lines had rushed forward into No-mans Land. The British philosophy of attack rather than defence ensured that little energy was wasted building expansive, lavish positions that would shortly be left behind by the large-scale attacks northward (Fussell 1977: 43).

These conditions and attitudes towards the Allied positions allowed the degradation of the landscape to hamper the troops and become their most bitter enemy.