Dear Mom & Dad Paris France Dec 14 1914 Christmas is arriving and I wanted to write a letter telling you how Im holding at base camp so far. First and form most I arrived here in France safe and sound. The Trip took one week. Anyways the war is beginning and im getting ready to take part in action soon. I have to take a 5 day training session before we are put into to battle. I find it very difficult and tiring. I already miss home so much. Life feels very different here. I will try again and write to you guys as soon as possible. Hey its me again! I am currently in battle right now. As you can see we are living in the trenches of the battle field. I will tell all of you my view of these horrible trenches. Okay lets start. The wall of the trenches are briefly 10 to 12 feet deep. Their this deep so that enemy’s can not shoot at us. There are duckboards used for the surface so we can not sink into the soft ground. There are large amounts of sand bags which are called parapets. They cover us from our backs to front from enemy fire. This is good because there is a slimmer chance of us getting shot at. We use a fire step to step on to get a comfortable aim when shooting. Barbed wire covers the front of our trench so that no enemy could intrude into our base. These barbed wires stretched some 30 feet in height. I think the most useful thing about the trenches is the zig zaggy shape. This was important so that if an enemy got inside he wouldn’t be able to fire straight and kill all of us. Well that’s all the main idea’s of how a trench looks like. I hope you guys all understand. Trench duty is very hard on all of us and its very very stressful. When the weather got bad like in the winter we would all freeze and suffer from froze bite. A bunch of us including myself would protect and handle the front line for a period of time . We were expected to go into “No Mans Land” enemy territory and take down the objective. It Was so hard to and we took a big chance of getting shot at. You had to be real quiet in not being spotted. We had many shifts day in and day out. Sometimes we got days off were me and my pals could go and have a laugh together. Other times we had to protect our base camp. These shifts were very exuasting. We had to be on alert 24/7. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t go anymore but it it my job to defend my people and my country. These trenches are probably one of the most horrible and dirtiest places a man can live. The trenches were so low in living and were very sad looking. Everytime it would rain we would get soaked because their was no shelter that covered us. The trenches would sooner or later fill up with water and start to flood like crazy. The walls would turn nito wet mud and collapse down onto us. Some of us soldiers would get trap underneath the heavy mud. Another major problem we suffered from was trench foot. Most of us got trench foor and it was very discusting. It was hard to take care of. Trench foot is when mud and water condesnses into the boot and the foots starts to rot. Anyways there was lack of food, so therefore all of us starved to death. Peopl got very ill and had no energy to get up and fight. The hygiene and health issues got really bad. Rats and lice were everywhere. It wasn’t a very comfortable sight. These trenches are the worst place to live on Earth.

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