How does stalemate describe life in the trenches

Fighting ground to a stalemate. Inside a trench, all that is visible is just a few feet on either side, ending at the trench walls in front and back, with a patch of leaden sky visible above.

Trenches in WWI were constructed with sandbags, wooden planks, woven sticks, tangled barbed wire or even just stinking mud. 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. The trench systems on the Western Front were roughly miles long, stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps, although not in a continuous line.

British troops suffered 60, casualties on the first day of fighting alone. German soldiers lying dead in a trench after the Battle of Cambrai, With soldiers fighting in close proximity in the trenches, usually in unsanitary conditions, infectious diseases such as dysentery, cholera and typhoid fever were common and spread rapidly.

Constant exposure to wetness caused trench foot, a painful condition in which dead tissue spread across one or both feet, sometimes requiring amputation. Trench mouth, a type of gum infection, was also problematic and is thought to be associated with the stress of nonstop bombardment. It was also the first conflict in world history to have more deaths caused from combat, rather than from disease spread during fighting. Trench warfare was also employed in World War II and in the Korean War to some degree, but it has not been used regularly during conflicts in the ensuing decades.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you.

Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you.