So why is it always muddy? The real answer is high explosive shells (particularly, but not exclusively, penetrating high explosive shells). Heavy artillery shells in the First World War were made to penetrate into the ground and then explode, sending up a rain of loose dirt – the idea was to be able to destroy or at least bury trenches and deep bunkers. The explosions were so powerful that they uprooted trees and grass, leaving behind the “blasted moonscape” so common in pictures of the Western Front. All that remained were the deep craters which collected water and turned into often fatal mud-traps (Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), includes a horrific description of one man, unable to assist, having to watch another man sucked under the mud to his death in such a crater).
This kind of terrain – with so much of the ground-cover blasted away – would turn into mud-soaked pits the moment it rained – particularly where water collected in the shell-holes.
That also explains why these post-battle scenes often lack any kind of local terrain features. Powerful explosive shells could annihilate terrain features like forests, roads, hedgerows, fences, fields – even hills and entire villages – with extended bombardments. And without any ground-cover left, almost any rain at all will then reduce the local terrain into a mud-soaked bog, especially if the local soil drains poorly (as it did so famously in Flanders).
The problem with depicting medieval, or even early modern battlefields this way is, of course, that these armies do not possess any weapons which can deliver this kind of destruction. Even as late as the American Civil War, field artillery – even massed field artillery – was simply not that powerful (although some heavy naval and siege guns were beginning to come close). Post-battle photography of Gettysburg – even in the approaches to Cemetery Ridge and around the Wheat Field – areas of fierce fighting – shows not only trees and ground-cover, but even fences and buildings largely intact.
Field artillery firing solid shot from 6 to 20lbs to is simply not strong enough to tear apart the terrain in the way that we often see in popular depictions of historical or fantasy battlefields; as pictured above, the guns doing that in WWI were often firing 1,000+ pound shells, 100 times the weight of shot of a normal ACW cannon (lighter artillery, like the famed French 75 (Matériel de 75mm Mle 1897) still fired lighter shells – the French 75 fired a c. 12lbs shell – but still had far more explosive power due to improvements in explosives; that said, the French 75, a capable field gun, was famously too light for ideal use in the trenches). Massed musketry won’t do it either and so massed arrow or crossbow fire, catapults or whatever else certainly won’t.
(This, as a side note, may go some distance to explaining why First World War commanders were so unprepared for the challenges the new terrain they were creating in turn inflicted on them. Doctrine said that the solution to well-entrenched infantry was to mass artillery against them – blast them out of position. It had never been the case before that such massed artillery would render the ground itself impassible, because the artillery had never before been powerful enough to do so.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collection: The Battlefield After the Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-18.
November 11, 2022
QotD: WW1 was the first war where the artillery was destructive enough to change the landscape
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