How did trench warfare destroy the image of war as a heroic undertaking?

Answer 1

One of the features of World War I was the way the conflict on the Western Front quickly developed into brutal trench warfare, with neither side able to advance its position, gaining only a few feet at a tremendous loss of life.

Arranged in a zigzag pattern, these rudimentary trenches were designed so that enemy troops couldn't fire straight down the ditch if they broke through the opposing army's defenses. By war's end, the trenches had morphed into elaborate passageways where soldiers ate, slept and lived, before, of course, many of them died.

Aside from the deadly nature of this warfare, soldiers also suffered through the weather conditions on the front. Heavy rainfall would flood the trenches and create such extreme muddy conditions that drowning was a constant threat. The soggy conditions often resulted in "trench foot," which when untreated led to gangrene. The threat of disease was ever-present as rats, flies and lice bred in huge numbers.

The sheer futility of this type combat prompted a round of deadly innovation-the first use of poison gas and the widespread use of the barbed-wire fence. The Fencing created a contested territory, or "No Man's Land," between the two enemy trench systems in which neither side could move openly.

And it was another innovation: the Allies' tank, which gained widespread use in the final year of the war that eventually broke the stalemate in the trenches.