WWI and the AEF

[Pete]

The other day an unusual thread on the Great War Forum inspired me to be in a satirical mood, so I post my essay here so my wit won't entirely go to waste. Someone asked what would happen were a Gurkha battalion to occupy a trench on the Western Front during the First World War. His point was that the average Gurkha was only about 65 inches tall, 5 ft 5 in, whereas the standard trench was 82 inches deep, so how could the little guys see over the parapet? It led to a thread of around 40 messages, with many gravely earnest people posting wartime anecdotes about the proper design of trenches and diagrams on trench dimensions from Engineer publications during the war. (It could be that I need a new way of spending my time.)

Would the Great War have been won sooner if all the short guys, medium ones and tall guys been put in different battalions? If that had been done the Pioneers could have saved themselves a lot of extra work from having to dig deep trenches. Instead, had they known in advance that little short guys would be occupying the trenches they might have saved themselves a lot of unneccesary work by having to dig deeper. Conversely, trenches that were dug too deep for little guys required additional exertions to build up steps so the short ones could see over the parapet. When you visualize the scope of this situation across the BEF's entire front it adds up to an enormous amount of work that might have been saved.

Well, I was thinking, had that happened, with all of that saved effort for the Pioneers, Engineers, and Labor Corps, it might have let them work on other projects that might well have brought the Germans to their knees much much earlier than as it turned out. In fact, this issue of the depth of trenches might go down in history as one of the great might-have-beens of the Great War. I never would have thought of this if it weren't for GWF.