New Zealand forces had encountered a version of trench warfare in Gallipoli. However, the New Zealand trenches were often on precipitous slopes (such as the norotious Quinn's Post), close to their enemy's trenches. Bitter experience there had shown that daylight frontal assaults on positions held in strength with machine guns, back by rapid rifle fire, inevitably resulted in costly failure. When the New Zealand Division moved to positions in northern France near Armentieres, the situation they found there was quite different from Gallipoli.
Two of the more valuable memoirs of New Zealand's contribution to World War I were written by Cecil Malthus. He was one of the few tertiary-educated men in the New Zealand Division. He eventually became Professor of Modern languages at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. His books An Anzac Retrospective and Armentieres and the Somme provide a thoughtful account of these campaigns, with reflections on the significance of his experience. Malthus noted key differences between the systems of trench warfare in France compared with Gallipoli. One obvious difference was the amount of room that permitted successive lines of defence. In France, the trench system was more complex. The front line trenches were in reality a delaying or warning line, consisting of a series of small pockets held by platoons or sections about 150 metres from the support line. The support line was the strongest line of defence. Daily work for men in the support line was largely construction or maintenance of defences, such as digging or improving trenches or mending or strengthening wire defences. Five hundred metres further back was another line, but men stationed there were likely to be employed on a variety of military fatigues and Malthus states that it was “regarded as a semi-resting position.” When not required for duty in the trenches, the New Zealanders, like other soldiers other units fighting for the British frequented towns such as Armentieres , where they patronised the estaminets and engaged in banter with the mademoiselles in a mish-mash of English and French. The diagram below shows this layered trench structure.
The structure of the actual trench is evident in the diagram below.
The creation and maintenance of such trenches required massive amounts of manual labour. It is not surprising that much of a soldier's day might be taken up with digging, rather than fighting. It was for this reason that the soldiers in the New Zealand Division acquired the soubriquet of "Digger".
| The Origins of Trench Warfare | Routine Life in the Trenches | Patrols and Raiding from the Trenches | Assaulting a Trench Line | Defeating a Trench Line |