Whats it like to be a soilder in ww1?

Question

Anyone know what it is like to be a soilder in ww1? How old were most of them? what were their daily tasks?

Thanks alot if you can help, please post links if you can.

Answer 1

It was living in a trench. You are sold and wet most of the time. you have indirect fire pounding your position. Also, when the troops attack, they were mowed down with direct interlocking machine gun fire.

Then the French, use to place numbers on soldiers. When an attack fail, they drew a number. Soldiers with this number were executed as cowards.

Answer 2

Not quite as popular imagination has it.

I recommend "Mud, Blood and Poppycock" by Gordon Corrigan. By looking at original documents he overturns a lot of well-established myths.
Chapter 3 is on "The horrors of the trenches", and goes right down to things like details of the daily menu (The British army planned on giving front-line soldiers 4,193 calories per day), and noted that rarely was a battalion in the front trench more than 12 days in a month, usually considerably less, and no more than 7 at a stretch, again, usually less.

The book also contains a example list of daily battalion duties for a month.

Horrors there definitely were, but also humour. I have an original WW1 publication "More Fragments from France" by Bruce Bairnsfather, his second volume of cartoons from the trenches.

Answer 3

i hear a lot of the pilots were teenagers