Describe the experience of soldiers fighting on the Western Front.

On the Western Front, which was almost entirely confined to France and Belgium, the First World War was generally characterized by trench warfare. This meant that vast armies, Allied and German, huddled in trenches that stretched over hundred of miles and waged a grinding war of attrition against each other. Facing intermittent barrages of long-range artillery, occasional poison gas attacks, and the constant threat of sniper fire, they awaited orders to go "over the top" through machine-gun fire, bomb craters, land mines, and barbed wire in an effort to break through enemy lines. When in the trenches, where they often stayed for weeks at a time, they lived in mud, with rats and lice constant menaces. Not only physical disease, but mental illness, known at the time as "shell shock," plagued soldiers in this new, modern warfare. Soldiers lived through grueling campaigns and offensives that usually only succeeded in moving lines a few miles one way or another. Before 1918, when American troops helped to beat back a desperate German offensive, the war was a bloody stalemate.