For the soldier in the trenches mud was the bain of his life.  Many trenches were badly drained, and the low lying area in the Ypres Salient turned to quagmire, especially remembered at Passchendaele.

The book on the right by Gordon Corrigan is a good one on the life of the soldiers.

The picture on the right shows a couple of soldiers getting a ‘cuppa’, the condition of their clothing can be seen, and one can only imagine how uncomfortable it must have been living like that.

The mud was not only a problem for the men when they took their spell in the trenches, it reached right back to the rear areas.  Movement from rest areas to the trenches was on walkways over mud, vehicles and horses had to try to bring up supplies through the clinging, cloying mess.  Looking at photos from that time it is just so difficult to imagine myself in those conditions.  My grandfather was an ordinary working class labourer from Sheffield, like so many of the others out there, but somehow they seemed to just put up with it and get on with it.  Henry Williamson wrote an article for his old school, and part of it read; “We have had rather a stiff time at the front.  The chief trouble is the mud. We sleep on mud, we freeze on mud, we get mud on our rifles, on our cl;othes, in our hair, in our food.”

It must have been difficult and also frightening for the many hundreds of horses used by the army to move supplies. The picture on the left shows how deep the mud pools could be.

Max Plowman’s ‘Subaltern on the Somme’ has a small section called ‘Desolation on the Somme’, and I have reproduced it here;

“In the dusk of a leaden afternoon we march away from Trones Wood through Guillemont and Ginchy.  On the eastern side of the tiny village of Ginchy we are suddenly confronted with a wide, rolling, open plain over which there is no road but only a single ‘duck-walk’ track. Slowly the battalion stretches itself out in single file along this track, and one by one the men follow each other, till the trail extends like the vertebrae of an endless snake.  On either side lies the open plain. Not a sign of life is anywhere to be seen, but instead there appear, in countless succession, stretching as far as the eye can pierce the gloom, shell-holes filled with water.  The sense of desolation these innumerable, silent, circular pools produce is horrible, so vividly do they remind me of a certain illustration by Dore to Dante’s Inferno, that I begin to wonder whether I have not stepped out of life and entered one of the circles of the damned; and as I look upon these evil pools I half expect to see a head appearing from each one. Here and there the succession of pools is broken by what appear in the fading light to be deep yawning graves, and over these our duck-walk makes a frail and slippery bridge.

On and on we go. Jog, jog jog behind one another, till slowly the merciful darkness shuts out all sight of this awful land of foreboding.  But now the difficulty of our march increases, for many of the laths of these duck-boards are broken, and in the darkness a man trips and falls, pitching his sand-bag of rations or box of bombs into the mud that lies deep on either side of the track. Whenever this happens, the rest of the battalion behind him has to halt while he picks himself up, recovers his load and steadies himself on the track again before trying to make good the gap between himself and the man in front.  Despite the cautions passed along the line a hundred times: “Look out” - “Mind the gap” - “Hole there”, these mishaps constantly occur, till we in the rear wonder why in the name of Heaven long halts should be needed when those in front must still be miles from the trenches. At last the men in front move, and on we go again. On and on, till it seems we must be seeking the very end of nowhere, for still the Verey lights, which will show us the line of the trenches, do not appear. Every now and then shells drop, sometimes near enough to spatter us with mud and make us shudder to think what kind of death we should meet if one dropped near enough to lift us into the watery, muddy depths of a shell-hole. But even the shells seem to be wandering, for they come fitfully, as if they were fired from nowhere and had lost their way.

On and on we go. It is getting towards midnight now.  The duck-walk ceases and we come out on high grass-land, where the going is good so long as we keep to the crest of the hill and pick a careful way between the shell-holes. Now we are turning and gently descending the hill. The waspish flight of whiz-bangs is heard quite close.  We must be near the line at last, though it is still out of sight.  Now we drop into mud ankle-deep. A man shouts it is up to the knees where he stands.  New voices are heard. The company is no longer extended. There is Rowley. We have arrived.

Across twenty yards of quagmire rough trenches are dimly visible.  They are the reserve trenches - ours.  The men clamber into them and wrap themselves in their ground-sheets. We have reached the mud.”

The trenches in these conditions were a frightful place. Max Plowman again; “Rain, rain, rain!  It has rained all day.  We are all in the trench at last, though some of the men remained stuck on the way till long after daylight. While the trenches are in this condition we can neither get to the Germans nor they to us. Both sides are glued where they stand, so that Heaven alone knows what purpose we serve here, or whether we shall ever get out again.” 

And again; “ The trench is empty.  In the watery moolight it appears  a very ghostly place. Corpses lie along the parados, rotting in the wet; every now and then a booted foot appears jutting over the trench. The mud makes it all but impassable, and now, sunk in up to the knees, I have the momentary terror of never being abvle to pull myself out.

Edmund Blunden was a young officer, he enlisted at the age of twenty, and fought in the battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele. When I went on the battlefield tour of the Somme, we had rain every day, and it was particularly poignant when we visited the cemetery at Tyne Cot.  The low sky and the pouring rain made some of Richard Holmes’ commentary on Passchendaele very relevant.

From Edmund Blunden’s book “Undertones of War”; “The wooden track ended, and then the men fought their way on through the gluey morass, until not one nor two were reduced to tears and impotent wild cries to God.  They were not yet at the worst of their duty, for the Schwaben Redoubt ahead was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing - and there the deep dugouts, which faced the German guns, were cancerous with torn bodies, and to pass an entrance was to gulp poison; in one place a corpse had apparently been thrust in to stop up a doorway’s dangerous displacement, and an arm swung stupidly.  Men of the next battalion were found in mud up to the armpits, and their fate was not spoken of; those who found them could not get them out. The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified. Here we were to ‘hold the line’, for an uncertain sentence of days.”

In the book “At the going down of the sun” there is a brief mention of the mud in the winter of 1914-15.  “Alternate periods of frost and thaw caused parapets to collapse and turned trenches into muddy quagmires. On the front of the 3rd Worcesters under Spanbroek Mill, the slime was so deep that sentries had to be stationed standing in barrels, where they would remain marooned for their period of duty.  These were ideal conditions for snipers and the German marksmen drew a steady toll of casualties.”

Sidney Rogerson in his book ‘Twelve Days’ describes the mud on the Somme, which he felt was the dominating feature of a soldiers life; ‘...mud which was unique even for the Somme.  It was like walking through caramel..... No one could struggle through that mud for even a few yards without rest.  Terrible in its clinging consistency, it was the arbiter of destiny, the supreme enemy, paralysing and mocking English and German alike.  Distances were measured not in yards but in mud.’

Another effect of mud was on wounds, and there were some terrible wounding effects from the artillery and machine-guns.  The following is taken from the book ‘At the going down of the sun’. 

“The heavily cultivated soil in Flanders contained much manure, which was home to a virulent bacillus that usually resided in horse’s intestines.  If this bacillus - or the soil in which it lived- entered a wound, a terrible condition known as gas gangrene could ensue. A doctor at the front described the symptoms: ‘After 48 hours the edges of the wound begin to swell up and turn, making it gape.  The cut surface takes on a curious half-jellified, half-mummified look, then the whole wounded limb begins to swell up and distend in the most extraordinary fashion, turning, as it does so, first an ashy white and then a greenish colour.  This is because the tissues are being literally blown out with gas.’  In short, the body began to rot from the inside out. Removal of the damaged tissue or limb was the only effective treatment. However, if the infection was treated too late or became too deeply rooted, there was only one possible outcome: a slow and lingering death.”  And from Max Arthur’s book; “A third of those wounded, even with fairly slight wounds, died of an infection. The soil in Rouen and Flanders was absolutely contaminated.  I was at Rouen hospital after I finally got my first wound and this old soul said, ‘Yes, you’ve got a jolly nice wound there, mate, it’ll get you to Blighty all right. But the only thing is, it’s infected.” Cpl. Lane who described this to Arthur was lucky, he lived through his infected wound.

It is difficult not to admire the sheer stoicism of ordinary men like my grandfather living in the conditions of the trenches, this is reflected in an entry in General Jack’s diary, January 6th 1915.  It is wet and miserable; “The men are great-hearted fellows.  Their legs, capes and jerkins are habitually sodden with wet clay. Where there is a small patch of fairly solid ground the lucky ones off duty huddle round a coke brazier, of which each company has five.  In spite of extremely long hours on duty in great discomfort, hard labour repairing the parapets and other defences, besides no proper meals in the trenches, there is little grumbling and never a whine from their lips whatever they may think of the business in hand....”