(2) Private Livesay, letter to parents living in East Grinstead (6th March, 1915)

Our trenches are... ankle deep mud. In some places trenches are waist deep in water. Time is spent digging, filling sandbags, building up parapets, fetching stores, etc. One does not have time to be weary.

 

(3) Private Pollard wrote about trench life in his memoirs published in 1932.

The trench, when we reached it, was half full of mud and water. We set to work to try and drain it. Our efforts were hampered by the fact that the French, who had first occupied it, had buried their dead in the bottom and sides. Every stroke of the pick encountered a body. The smell was awful.

 

(4) J. B. Priestley, letter to his father, Jonathan Priestley (December, 1915)

The communication trenches are simply canals, up to the waist in some parts, the rest up to the knees. There are only a few dug-outs and those are full of water or falling in. Three men were killed this way from falling dug-outs. I haven't had a wash since we came into these trenches and we are all mud from head to foot.

 

(5) Bruce Bairnsfather, Bullets and Billets (1916)

It was quite the worse trench I have ever seen. A number of men were in it, standing and leaning, silently enduring the following conditions. It was quite dark. The enemy were about two hundred yards away, or rather less. It was raining, and the trench contained over three feet of water. The men, therefore, were standing up to the waist in water. The front parapet was nothing but a rough earth mound which, owing to the water about, was practically non-existent. They were all wet through and through, with a great deal of their equipment below the water at the bottom of the trench. There they were, taking it all as a necessary part of a great game; not a grumble nor a comment.

 

(6) Captain Lionel Crouch wrote to his wife about life in the trenches in 1917.

Last night we had the worst time we've had since we've been out. A terrific thunderstorm broke out. Rain poured in torrents, and the trenches were rivers, up to one's knees in places and higher if one fell into a sump. One chap fell in one above his waist! It was pitch dark and all was murky in the extreme. Bits of the trench fell in. The rifles all got choked with mud, through men falling down.

 

(7) Guy Chapman, A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography (1933)

Rain had made our bare trenches a quag, and earth, unsupported by revetments, was beginning to slide to the bottom. We hailed the first frost which momentarily arrested our ruin. Saps filled up and had to be abandoned. The cookhouse disappeared. Dugouts filled up and collapsed. The few duckboards floated away, uncovering sump-pits into which the uncharted wanderer fell, his oaths stifled by a brownish stinking fluid.

 

(8) Vyvyan Harmsworth, letter to Lord Rothermere (13th January, 1915)

Hell is the only word descriptive of the weather out here and the state of the ground. It rains every day! The trenches are mud and water up to one's neck, rendering some impassable - but where it is up to the waist we have to make our way along cheerfully. I can tell you - it is no fun getting up to the waist and right through, as I did last night. Lots of men have been sent off with slight frost-bite - the foot swells up and gets too big for the boot.

 

(9) Second Lieutenant E. J. Ruffell, letter about Oostkerke, Belgium (November, 1917)

I have never seen a more depressing, desolate country than the part were in - the mud was black and of the clinging variety, its usual depth being about 9 inches. When the guns fired, the whole earth - or rather mud - shook like a Blanc mange. It was not much pleasure to pull each foot in turn with both hands out of the mud, especially when being shelled.