Life in the WW1 Trenches, Hour by Hour: Could You Survive One Day?

It's 5 a.m. on the Somme, summer 1916, and a sergeant is kicking your boots. There's no snooze button, and he's holding a bayonet. Your job is to survive one day in a First World War trench, eight stops on the clock, ending at 7:30 tomorrow morning. Trust me, you'll want to know what happens at 7:30.

The odds aren't great. One in nine British soldiers never came home, and about a quarter of a million of the men who signed up were 19 or younger. Bring snacks. Actually, don't. The rats will eat them.

5 a.m.: stand-to, glaring at the sunrise

You're up an hour before dawn, rifle ready on the fire step, glaring at the sunrise like it owes you money, because dawn is when attacks come.

Nobody fought non-stop for years, though. A unit spent about 10 days a month in the trenches, rarely more than three of them at the front, and most of it was chores like sandbags, repairs and digging latrines. The least heroic montage ever made.

Officers got the dugouts. You slept on the floor in bursts, like a phone stuck at 3%. Quiet didn't mean safe either. Today's forecast is sunny with snipers, and even quiet sectors lost men every day.

8 a.m.: breakfast, and the biscuit that broke teeth

The good news is 4,000 calories a day and meat every day, a luxury for lots of families back home. The bad news is that you've met the meat. It's cold bully beef again, because cooking smoke drew enemy fire, and hot food in hay boxes came late or never.

Then there's the army biscuit, a 10 cm square so hard you soaked it in tea or lost a tooth. Soldiers carved them into picture frames, or stuck a stamp on one and posted it home.

The water arrived in old petrol tins and tasted like it, so you hid the taste in tea. The rum jars were stamped SRD. Soldiers decided that stood for "seldom reaches destination".

Noon: rats, lice and trench fever

Meet your roommates, millions of rats, maybe more than there were soldiers. They ate your food and candles and used your face as a shortcut. The French army paid 50 centimes per rat tail, the grimmest side hustle ever.

The bigger problem was in your shirt. In one wartime study, 95 in every 100 men had lice, about 20 each on average, and some carried more than 130. That's not lice any more, that's a village.

Lice droppings rubbed into your scratches gave you trench fever, so scratching the itch was literally rubbing it in. There were about 450,000 British cases, and recovery could take a month or more. Plenty of men didn't mind, because a month of fever beat a month in the trench. Even J.R.R. Tolkien caught it.

3 p.m.: trench foot, even in summer

Then it rains, and now you're standing shin-deep in cold, muddy water. It's summer, so your feet can't freeze, right? They don't have to. Trench foot could set in at 16°C after just 10 hours in wet boots.

Your feet quietly unsubscribe. They go numb, turn red or blue, swell up and smell of rot. In bad cases they were amputated. About 75,000 British soldiers got trench foot, and in the worst mud, wounded men sometimes drowned in flooded shell holes.

The fix was whale oil and fresh socks two or three times a day. You smelled like a fish market, but you kept your toes. Every man also had a foot buddy to check his feet. Nothing says brotherhood like inspecting another man's toes. Trench foot even turned up again at Glastonbury Festival in 1998 and 2007.

5:30 p.m.: the gas gong

A sentry starts banging a gong. That gong means gas.

At about 5 o'clock on 22 April 1915, 167 tons of chlorine drifted onto French troops at Ypres. The first gas mask was a wet cloth. No water? Urine was thought to work even better, and suddenly all that tea paid off. Within a few months men had the smoke helmet, a flannel bag with a little window.

So was gas the big killer? Not really. About 3 in 100 British gas casualties died, and 7 in 10 were back within six weeks. But it was terrifying, and because it's heavier than air, it sank into the trench. The safest spot from gas was on top of the trench, the least safe spot from everything else.

9 p.m.: the shells you never see

Forget film bayonet charges. More than half of all battle injuries came from shells fired by gunners miles away, out of sight. Soldiers named them like pets. The whizz-bang was so fast you heard it arrive before you heard the gun. Terrible pets.

Your armour was a steel helmet the Germans called a salad bowl. In 1915 there were 50 per battalion, passed around like the world's sweatiest library book.

This week your own side fires a million and a half shells over your head in seven days. The guns were heard 165 miles away on Hampstead Heath in London. Up to 3 in 10 shells didn't explode, and farmers still plough them up. In 2019, Belgium's bomb squad cleared more than 200 tons. The helmet stops the metal. Nothing stops what the noise does to your head.

3 a.m.: shell shock

Imagine walking away without a scratch while your hands won't stop shaking. Your ears ring, and every bang makes you flinch. Some men lost their memory. Some couldn't speak. By 1918 the army had registered 80,000 cases.

The army's answer was paperwork. Break down after a shell burst and you were marked W, for wounded, which meant a stripe and a pension. No shell, and you were S, for sick, with no stripe and no pension. Same brain, different letter. In 1917 the army banned the term "shell shock" and used NYDN instead, short for "not yet diagnosed, nervous". In other words, no idea.

The British Army shot 306 of its own men for desertion, cowardice and similar offences, some of them shell-shocked. They were pardoned in 2006. The damage followed men home, too. By 1939 about 120,000 veterans had psychiatric pensions or awards. As one reporter wrote, "They have not come back the same men."

7:30 a.m.: over the top

Four and a half hours later, it's 7:30 on 1 July 1916, and tomorrow had a name all along. It's the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

The plan was that a week of shelling had cut the wire and wrecked the German defences, so you could just cross and take the empty trenches. At 7:20, and again at 7:28, giant mines blew up under the German line. You climbed the ladder carrying up to 66 lb of kit, two gas masks included. At 7:30 the shelling stopped and the whistles blew.

In many places the wire was still uncut. The defenders had waited out the shelling in deep dugouts, and now they came up with machine guns. By nightfall the British Army had 57,470 casualties, and 19,240 of them were dead. It is still the bloodiest day in British Army history.

Friends and neighbours had joined up together in Pals battalions. Of about 720 Accrington Pals, 585 were casualties within about half an hour. Of about 800 Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel, 68 answered the roll call the next morning.

The battle went on for 141 days. It cost more than a million casualties by most counts and moved the line about 6 miles. At Thiepval, a memorial carries 72,337 names of men with no known grave.

That's the twist. The rats, lice, gas and shells all came with some cover, and the deadliest order was the one to climb out. The trench was never the worst part. It was the shelter. For other grim eras, see how long you would survive in history.

The short version

• Trench life was mostly chores, broken sleep and snipers.
• Food was cold bully beef, rock-hard biscuits and water that tasted of petrol.
• Rats, lice, trench fever and trench foot wore men down even on quiet days.
• Gas killed about 3 in 100 British gas casualties. Shells caused more than half of all battle injuries, and shell shock followed many men home.
• The deadliest moment was climbing out on 1 July 1916. By nightfall, 19,240 British soldiers were dead.