Customer Reviews

Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I

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John Ellis, a military historian, wrote "Eye Deep in Hell" to explain the daily routines of the fighting men of World War I. The title of the book comes from the poet Ezra Pound, who wrote an epitaph for the soldiers who survived and died on the mud caked battlefields. Pound's poem adequately reflects the true nature of trench warfare during this meat grinder of a war. WWI was not a glorious call to arms or a romantic charge on a horse between dashing young men; it was attrition warfare on a massive scale, killing millions with little movement on both sides. Unfortunately, WWI is largely forgotten today because most of the veterans are gone and the bigger death tolls of WWII overshadowed the millions killed during 1914-1918.

You will not find much here about the causes of WWI or detailed explanations about the movements of troops during battle. Ellis concerns himself with how the men survived on a day-to-day basis, in those times between the grinding offensives. What quickly emerges in Ellis's book is a vivid picture of the utter despair of life in the trenches, lives mired in rampant disease, hunger, violent death, misery, and inclement weather. How anyone survived this war with their sanity intact is a mystery for the ages.

Ellis covers every conceivable aspect of daily routine and life in the trenches by dividing his book into four sections. The first part of the book describes the type of trenches built along the front. The first trench line was where the soldiers charged the enemy when an offensive took place. Connected to this trench by shorter trenches were reserve lines where soldiers could retreat if necessary, and where supplies of ammunition, food, mail, and clothing where moved to the front. Attached to the front line trenches were saps, little trenches running out into no man's land where observers attempted to keep an eye on the enemy lines. Also built into the trenches were dugouts, or deep bunkers where the officers lived. The men slept either against the trench wall or in little dugouts along the trench lines. Of course, sleep was a luxury few could afford. When the men were not watching the enemy lines, they were putting up barbed wire in no man's land, helping to reinforce or dig trenches, or moving supplies. All of these activities often took place in deep mud, standing water, and piles of poorly buried corpses.

As if dealing with these conditions were not bad enough, there was the constant threat of violent death. Men died when shot by snipers, from shell fragments and stray bullets, from grenades tossed in the trenches, from chlorine and mustard gas shells (a horrible, lingering death), and trench cave-ins. There were a thousand ways to die in the trenches, and precious few ways to live.

Ellis's second section deals with combat conditions. Offensives were never non-stop operations, but usually had a lengthy buildup. Soldiers knew they were in trouble when the shelling started in earnest. The constant shelling was an attempt to soften up the trenches before sending the men across no man's land. Soldiers described the shelling in numerous ways, all of them unpleasant. Several people said the shelling was so intense that it actually took on physical solidity, a presence in the environment that many soldiers said they thought they could literally touch. After the shelling came the assault, a soul shattering experience for all involved. Most knew they would die, but for many of the men it was more embarrassing to expose oneself as a coward to his fellow soldiers; it was fear that drove the men over the tops of the trenches into the withering machine gun fire. The psychological pressures were unbelievable, often leading to cases of "shell shock," where men lost their sanity and most likely never recovered from the pressures of war.

The third part of the book concerns "lighter" topics. A big part of this section deals with food supplies. Predictably, the food on the front was quite poor. Biscuits handed out to the soldiers were as hard as rocks, bread was stale, stews contained more fat than meat, and field kitchens rarely worked. The soldiers did receive alcoholic beverages, especially French and German troops who carried wine on a regular basis. It was not uncommon to give the boys a tot of gin before they went over the top to their deaths. Better food and supplies, as well as entertainment, were found during rest leave behind the lines.

The final segment of Ellis's book concerns the attitude of the troops. It is here that Ellis examines the mentality of the military elite towards the war. Incredibly, most generals and field marshals believed morale meant more on the battlefield than modern weaponry. The men who actually fought held a quite different view about combat, and accordingly despised the high commanders who rarely visited the battlefields but made decisions that cost millions of lives. At the same time, soldiers did respect line officers. They recognized that these officers often shared the same wretched conditions as the common soldier. A good line officer rarely had difficulty getting his men to follow orders.

Ellis's book covers just about every angle one could think of about World War I. There are plenty of pictures included in the book, some of which are quite gruesome but necessary in order to convey the absolute horror of trench warfare. Unfortunately, Ellis only covers the Western Front, so information about the war against Russia and Turkey is missing from the book. The book also suffers from a shabby editing job, with missing and misspelled words appearing throughout the book. Despite these problems, Ellis is a great place to start for those interested in the Great War.

Eye-Deep in Hell is not about the tactics or strategy of World War One. If you are interested in that, I would recommend John Keegan's The First World War. However, if you want to know what it was like for the average footsolider to live, fight and die in the trenches of France and Belgium, this is the book to buy.

Ellis graphically describes the privations, the horrid living conditions, the food, the organization of the trenches, and the minutae of daily life that made the First World War so terrible. An entire chapter is devoted to the reality of fighting - what it was like to patrol at night, to "go over the top" and what happened to the casualties.

Of the thousands of books on WWI, this is one of the few to provide a glimpse of what the common British soldier experienced. For that, I recommend it to anyone interested in this time period.

An excellent social history of the First World War. Ellis begins by explaining how the trench warfare stalemate began, before devling into a an exceptional account of what daily life was like for soldiers on the western front (from rations, to medical problems, to daily details and combat.) The one drawback is that the book is exclusive to the Western Front, and primarily explores the British perspective. Nonetheless a very good read.

As a young girl, I was transfixed by the emotional battleground depicted in Vera Brittain's TESTAMENT OF YOUTH. This experience soon filled my bookshelves with World War I literature. EYE DEEP IN HELL is filled with the just the sort of human detail that connects the reader with the participants in the Great War. Everything is there-from battles to satirical songs to the chief survivors of horrific battles: the lice! We suffer with trench foot and hope for a "blighty"--the wound that will send us home. We are supplied with endless quantities of plum and apple jam, yet long for drinkable water. We long for home--yet find that the trench line is a psychological barrier that separates a soldier forever from the non-soldier. I would heartily recommend this book to any reader who wishes to read social history at its most riveting.

This is much in the manner of Lyn MacDonald's blighter's-eye-view accounts of the Great War. It is mostly composed of soldiers' accounts of their experiences of trench life and warfare, along with the emotional, moral, and spiritual dislocation that they endured. One quote from a German soldier on leave gives an idea of what horror they lived under, yet grew familiar with. "I am restless. I hate the kitchen table at which I am writing. I lost patience over a book. I should like to push the landscape aside as if it irritated me. I must get to the Front. I must again hear the shells roaring up into the sky and the desolate valley echoing the sound. I must get back to my Company...live once again in the realm of death."

This book is not as slick as the companion to the PBS series, yet it seems rawer, more real. It is a good, economical, brief introduction to what life was like for soldiers during this terrible catastrophe.

If you can finish reading "Eye-Deep in Hell" and believe that WWI was not so tough to fight in, you're a stronger person than I am.

Ellis presents a graphics-heavy book that focuses on the daily life of the soldier in WWI and only discusses the political reasons and strategies of the Great War if they make a point about the way the average soldier lived.

Each two-page spread holds at least one graphic: a photo, a diagram, or a reproduced label or sign. Most of the photos and graphics are very well chosen and enhance the reader's perception of the text. Unfortunately, the reproduction quality of some of the photographs is less than stellar, and the reader is left struggling to figure out what exactly the point of the picture is.

Read this book to understand what "The Average Soldier" (Ellis attempts to include facts about the soldiers fighting on both sides) had to deal with in World War I (I think re-enactors would find this book particularly useful), but select another for the facts of the war or any particular battle.

EYE-DEEP IN HELL: TRENCH WARFARE IN WORLD WAR I is a history of the soldier's life on the Western Front of World War I. Thoroughly researched, and written in a clear, straightforward documentary style, Ellis' survey puts the reader in the soggy, disintegrating boots of the British, Canadian, Australian, American, French or German soldier as he sat in the muddy trenches with the rats and lice and corpses and the sound of a thousand shells bursting over his head, waiting for his chance to be involved in another futile charge on the enemy trenches.

Ellis makes use of plenty of photographs, period illustrations and poetry, first-hand accounts and letters as he describes in detail the soldier's life. As can be expected, there are descriptions that will turn the reader's stomach (the wounds encountered by field doctors), but more surprisingly, there is also some grim humor to be found (the jam issued to British soldiers was almost always plum and apple, and in one account, "an issue of strawberry or raspberry jam was an historic occasion").

The insanity and short-sightedness of the generals and politicians of World War I is not entirely missing from this book, but it's not the point. This is not an overview of the war (like John Keegan's THE FIRST WORLD WAR), nor an in-depth history of one battle or campaign (like Alistair Horne's saga of Verdun THE PRICE OF GLORY). Ellis writes not about the madness of World War I, but about the madness of war itself: the "all hell" faced by the grunt paying the price for the failures of diplomats, presidents and kings. Although the British soldier (for obvious reasons) receives the most attention, all sides are taken into account, from the reasons they fought, to their daily realities on the front lines, to the confusion of battle, to the care they received in the hospital, to the disorientation they felt upon their return home.

Although this book could have benefited from a more careful proofreader (I've not seen this many typographical errors in any major university publication of comparable length), its writing is nearly flawless. It may not be the best jumping off place for an understanding of the war, but as a means of bringing history to life by living it through the eyes of the everyman, this is a great book for an understanding of World War I.

Oh dear, oh dear! We can all thank our lucky stars we will never be called to fight in a war like this. Here is an account that vividly & shockingly brings the reader face to face with all the horrors that WW1 soldiers (usually) stoicly accepted as part of their daily existence. This was a war of attrition. The majority of the combatants died whilst never coming face to face with the enemy. The grinding trench warfare routine became the principle enemy. Cloying mud, freezing weather, disease carrying rats, incessant sniping & constant bombardments brought death, wounds & incapacity in a cruel, unforgiving & random manner. The book, whilst brilliantly revealing the day to day soldier's lot, hardly touches the strategic development of the war & it's campaigns. This is not really such an important omission as it would have been in other wartime histories since financial considerations, rather than the static trench warfare, ultimately decided the outcome of this sad conflict. Excellent mix between author's narrative & eye witness reports. Most of the book is devoted to an in-depth insight into all the despair of the physical consequences of the war, particularly moving to me were the soldiers' accounts at the end, that reveal poignantly the lasting & laudable attitudes to comradeship & love for fellow sufferers, that blossomed from such awful, dire circumstances. Highly recommended!

The book provides you want the title implies, a solders view of trench warfare. This was the first book I read about WW 1, and that was probably a mistake on my part. This book does not provide the reader with much of the background or political reasons of the war, but that is not the intent of the book. There is a lot of detail about what it was like to be a foot solder during both combat and off combat times. I would have liked more focus on all of the other countries solders in a comparison format. Overall a good book that reads fast.

A well written book, easy to grasp and very informative. The horrors of the trench war are well described. One of the best books on the subject!