What do trenches look like

Trenches became trash dumps of the detritus of war: broken ammunition boxes, empty cartridges, torn uniforms, shattered helmets, soiled bandages, shrapnel balls, bone fragments. Trenches were also places of despair, becoming long graves when they collapsed from the weight of the war. They were easy targets and casualties were enormously high. By the end of , after just five months of fighting, the number of dead and wounded exceeded four million men.

Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. World War I—in Color. World War I. Soldiers read, kept journals, wrote letters, or gambled. Nighttime in the trenches was both the busiest and the most dangerous. Here, work parties repaired barbed wire or dug new trenches. Most of the iron harvest found by farmers in Belgium during the spring-planting and autumn-plowing seasons is collected and carefully placed around field edges, where it is regularly gathered by the Belgian army for disposal by controlled detonation.

The German and French armies fought a vicious battle for control of the strategically significant hill in , which preceded the much larger Battle of Verdun in American troops in the Meuse-Argonne region battled constantly for the high ground, which provided a vantage point against the enemy. A barbed-wire fence and the landscape, as seen from a gun position inside of a World War I bunker in Belgium on February 28, Bunkers and trenches, many very well preserved, can still be seen across the landscape in Flanders Fields.

Tyne Cot is the largest commonwealth war cemetery in the world. There are 11, commonwealth servicemembers from World War I buried or commemorated here. The skeleton of a church stands at the site once occupied by the village of Ornes on August 27, , near Verdun, France. Ornes, like a host of other villages in the region, was obliterated during the intense artillery and trench warfare between the German and French armies during the Battle of Verdun in , and was never rebuilt.

Fort Douamont was one of a string of French forts built along the Cotes de Meuse hilltop range, which became a focal point of bitter fighting between the German and French armies during the World War I Battle of Verdun in A cross made from basalt stands in front of original battlefield bunkers at the German Langemark Cemetery on March 26, , in Poelkapelle, Belgium. We want to hear what you think about this article.