The Australians spent two winters in the trenches on the Western Front, 1916-1917 and 1917-1918. Each seemed an eternity. Unaccustomed to the iciness and length of Continental winters the men suffered terribly. During the winter of 1916-17 more than 20,000 Australians were evacuated with exhaustion, frostbite or trench feet.
Sergeant R.A. McInnes, after a night on a shelf cut into the side of a trench, wrote, “When I woke I was terribly cold. My feet protruded from my overcoat and the caked mud on my big legging-boots were covered with white frost.”
Corporal A.G. Thomas wrote, “God, I cannot describe the horrors of last night. We just fell down and slept, rain and all, and shells falling all about us but we were too exhausted to bother, we didn’t mind if we were killed, it was terrible.”
After fitful sleep, men awoke before dawn to find their eyelids frozen shut and even their lips stuck together. Frozen ground was preferable to the mud but some men broke limbs when they slipped on the icy surfaces. Shells were more dangerous exploding on hard ground than in mud.
The Germans had deeper, warmer dugouts but they too suffered in the winter and on many occasions Australians and Germans climbed onto their respective parapets where they stamped about and exercised to warm their frozen bodies. Each side solved the problem of orders to “be aggressive” by ignoring each other.
Even in the relative comfort of billets life was hard. Ungloved hands were numb in a few seconds, boots need warming before being put on, bread could not be cut with a knife and boiling tea being rushed from the cookhouse froze within 20 paces.
In the trenches, the cold was so demoralising that rational thought was no longer possible and Australians prayed to be wounded, the only honourable escape from the torture of winter. Some exposed themselves to shellfire, risking death in the hope of a wound, which in any case could lead to dreadful privations before they reached hospital.
“Australian boys shouldn’t be expected to live like this,” a soldier wrote home in early 1917.