The Western Front Diary Entry Essay

Hello Mother and Father how are you doing? I haven’t been doing too well in the trenches. As you know I have been assisting the French in the trenches for nearly two years. The trenches are horrendous; I never thought I would be more petrified at the horrific conditions than the actual war. Every day we face rats, hundreds of millions of rats, scurrying through the trenches. Since we don’t have a proper waste disposal system, the rats eat the trash that lay on the floor and the soldiers who have died in combat. It’s a gruesome sight, watching a fallen solder’s surrounded by flies and the rats consume the decaying corpses. Trench foot is almost just as bad, a couple of my closest friends have died from it. They told us that we developed trench foot from standing
We also had to prevent body lice. They were awful, pale fawn in color, and left blotchy red bit marks all over the body. They were extremely hard to remove from our clothes since they hid in the seams of our uniforms. A lighted candle was effective but most solders were not thought at the boot camp. I have been trying to show as many solider on how to remove them without burning their clothes. The army sometimes arranged for our clothes to be put through delousing machines. This rarely worked because when we put our uniform back on the eggs hatched as a result form our body heat. It is very hard for me to order solders to “go over the top”, (that means to enter no man’s land) I and the solider know if they’re in the first couples rows of the raid they’ll be shot by a rifle or all gunned down by a machine gun. If you did not know what No Man’s Land is, it is the disputed ground between the front lines or trenches of our enemies. It also has a considerable amount of barbered wire, in some places it is more than 100 feet deep. I used to send night patrols to obtain information about the