The stories of these soldiers that fought in the Great War did battle in some of the worst conditions know. The pictures and accounts of these men bring the war stories I have read to life. I wonder if the men knew of the conditions they were about to go into, would they have been so patriotic. I'm still in reading soldiers accounts on various web sites, there is so much on the Great War. I want to share a story from an American soldier on the Western Front. He was clearing a field of bodies in order to did more trenches. Here is what Private Stuart Cloete witnessed. He writes in his book The Victorian Son, "As you lifted a body by its arms and legs, they detached themselves from the torso, and this was not the worst thing. Each body was covered inches deep with a black fur of flies, which flew up into your face, into your mouth, eyes and nostrils as you approached. The bodies crawled with maggots. The bodies had the consistency of Camembert cheese". (Cloete,1972) General Sherman's quote from the American Civil War was still true when American's fought in World War I, "War is Hell".

Poisonous gases were known about for a long time before the World War I but the military was reluctant to use them because they considered it to be an uncivilized weapon. The French were the first to use poisonous gas as a weapon. The used tear-gas grenades on the Germans. After the first German chlorine gas attacks, Allied troops were supplied with masks of cotton pads that had been soaked in urine. It was found that the ammonia in the urine pad neutralized the poison. Other soldiers preferred to use handkerchiefs, a sock, a flannel body-belt, dampened with a solution of bicarbonate of soda. It was not until July 1915 that soldiers were given efficient gas masks. The Germans first used mustard gas in 1917. The most lethal of all the poisonous chemicals used during the war, it was almost odorless and took twelve hours to take effect. Mustard gas was so powerful that only small amounts had to be added to high explosive shells to be effective. Once in the soil, mustard gas remained active for several weeks. An estimated 91,198 soldiers died as a result of poison gas attacks and another 1.2 million were hospitalized.

Men who died in the trenches were usually buried there. Bodies may lay for days before they are moved. Constant shelling did not allow the soldiers a chance to move the severely wounded or dead. With the bodies lying around rats and insects would be attracted to the bodies. One pair of rats can produce 880 offspring in a year so the trenches were soon infested with them. Some of the sickest stories told were of the trench rats. These rats were enormous in size, some the size of a small cat. The rats would ear right through them soldier's clothes and find crumbs of food in pockets. Soon the rats became bold and felt at ease around the soldiers. The rats very seldom attacked a soldier still alive. Some of the critically wounded men had to fight off rats, once they smelled the blood they came running. Two or three rats could always be found on a dead

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2084
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)