What was no mans land in ww1

They were filling sandbags with earth, piling them up bricklayer fashion, the headers and stretchers alternating, then patting them flat with spades. The sentries stood on the fire-step at the comers of the traverses, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers. Every now and then they peered over the top for a few seconds. Two parties, each of an N.

The German front line stretched some three hundred yards beyond. From berths hollowed in the sides of the trench and curtained with sandbags came the grunt of sleeping me. I jumped up on the fire-step beside the sentry and cautiously raised my head, staring over the parapet. I could see nothing except the wooden pickets supporting our protecting barbed-wire entanglements, and a dark patch or two of bushes beyond. The darkness seemed to move and shake about as I looked at it; the bushes started travelling, singly at first, then both together.

The pickets did the same. I was glad of the sentry beside me; he gave his name as Beaumont. A German flare shot up, broke into bright flame, dropped slowly and went hissing into the grass just behind our trench, showing up the bushes and pickets. Instinctively I moved. Not but what a flare is a bad thing to fall on you. I've seen them burn a hole in a man. We do all our fighting and moving at night and the confusion of passing through a barrage of enemy shells is pretty appalling.

You've read of the wrecked villages? Well, some of these about here are not wrecked. They are utterly destroyed, so that there are not even skeletons of building left - nothing but a churned mass of debris, with bricks, stones and girders and bodies pounded to nothing.

And forests! There are not even tree trunks left - not a leaf or a twig. All is buried and churned up again and buried again. The sad part is that one can see no end of this. If we live tonight we have to go through tomorrow night - and next week - and next month. No man's land in the salient varied from a few yards, incredible as this sounds, to about a hundred yards.

Shelling was not as common in the front line itself as further back owing to the proximity of the enemy. Trench mortar fire and rifle grenades were our bugbears in the front line. I preferred, of the two, shelling. A shell came quickly, a trench mortar rose high into the air and then on reaching the apex of its flight came down, turning over and over like an old boot, landing with a thud before it burst. From the apex downwards it always appeared to be making straight for you if you watched it, much as the eyes of a portrait seem to follow the viewer round a room.

I learned not to look. As it went, it wasn't a question of "if I get killed", it was merely a question of "when I get killed", because a battalion went over strong, you lost or , half the number, perhaps more.

Now it wasn't a question of saying, "I am one of the survivors, hurrah, hurrah", because you didn't go home Out came another draft of and you went over the top again. There was an awful feeling of a great black cloud on top of one the whole time, there seemed to be no future! You lived like a worm and your horizon was very limited to "shall I get back in time for the parcel to come?

Shall I ever get back to eat that cake that I know mother has sent me? I didn't dare think of tomorrow It was general abject misery. I think your imagination became dulled. I think in the end you just became a thing. At dawn on the morning of the attack, the battalion assembled in the mud outside the huts. I lined up my platoon and went through the necessary inspection. Some of the men looked terribly ill: grey, worn faces in the dawn, unshaved and dirty because there was no clean water.

I saw the characteristic shrugging of their shoulders that I knew so well. They hadn't had their clothes off for weeks, and their shirts were full of lice. Our progress to the battle area was slow and difficult.

We had to move forward in single file along the duckboard tracks that were loose and slimy. If you slipped off, you went up to your knees in mud.

During the walk the great bombardment from the British guns fell silent. For days it had wracked our nerves and destroyed our sleep. The sudden silence was uncanny. A sort of stagnant emptiness surrounded us. Your ears still sang from the incessant uproar, but now your mouth went dry.

At the outbreak of war in , the phrase became more commonly used. However, these ungoverned strips of land were not clearly geographically defined.

This is also the reason why the First World War is defined as a static war: the presence of barbed wire fences meant that the battles often fell into stalemate, with none of the opposite forces advancing.

Rather, each party stood in their own trenches and preferred attacking and striking their enemy from a distance. Although it was a dangerous enterprise, during the war, some artists engaged in the practice of documenting the modes of battle in their art.

One of the most dangerous ones is the Zone Rouge, a small area near Verdun in the centre of France. It is a virgin forest of around miles2. Although historically it is exceptionally interesting, having witnessed the fierce and bloody battles of World War I, it remains to this day horrific and deadly.

And woe betide the man who in daylight puts up his head carelessly to take a long glance at it. Swinton was basically writing for civilians back home who would read his dispatch at the earliest with their breakfast on Boxing Day, December But by this time at the front, here and there, soldiers had already caught the phrase and were beginning—just—to accept it as part of the culture.

Swinton himself was doubtless using it in conversation as well as print. One way or another it began the process of becoming the obvious, state-of-the-art phrase for a phenomenon of which everybody in front-line trenches was now very much aware. Writing in his diary on Christmas Day, Lt. Lothian Nicholson, C. For the first category there could be no better spokesman than the Irish brigadier general F.

I would as soon call my House! Krupp Villa, or my child Chlorina-Phosgena. Hence, the trench raid—the purpose of which was to cause general mayhem, kill as many of the enemy as possible, and bring back prisoners for interrogation. Impromptu and random at first, the raids became increasingly sophisticated and ambitious as the war went on.

They were often savage, high-risk affairs, with many casualties. Nor were the Germans slothful in mounting similar efforts. It was in just such a raid in February that Lt. Raids every night in the dark, always casualties and perhaps considered a great success if they got back with one prisoner.

All these raids were mostly just to find out what Division was opposite us. As if it mattered, no action was taken not matter what Division was opposite us. It should be pointed out, however, that occasionally raids did have important results; it was a raid on French trenches in April that gave the Germans the battle plan of the disastrous offensive about to be launched on the Chemin des Dames. One Canadian private on the Western Front reported the activities of a resourceful cat that regularly carried out its independent patrols and knew the mealtimes on both sides.

Earlier the same year, Capt. No Man's Land was not however barren of activity. During nightfall each side would despatch parties to spy on the enemy, or to repair or extend barbed wire posts.

Reconnaissance missions were similarly common. Injured men trapped in No Man's Land would often be brought in under cover of darkness, as were corpses for burial.