Trench Warfare

It was a warfare in which opposing armed forces attack, counterattack, and defend from relatively permanent systems of trenches dug into the ground. Each trench was dug in a type of zigzag so that no enemy, standing at one end, could fire for more than a few yards down its length.

 This kind of battle reached its highest development on the Western Front during the Great War, when armies of millions of men faced each other in a line of trenches extending from the Belgian coast through northeastern France to Switzerland. This was a way that France and Germany had to shatter against the deadly fire of the machine gun and other artillery. The sheer quantity of bullets and shells flying through the air in the battle conditions of that war compelled soldiers to burrow into the soil to obtain shelter and survive.