"My Daily Journal" Journal of Pvt. Donald Fraser (1915-1916)

This is excerpt of a Canadian soldier serving in WWI, whose name was Donald Fraser. The text recounts his experiences of heading into the Western Front, including a high amount of detail ranging from various tasks and equipment to the notable deaths of each comrade beside him. Trench warfare was a stalemate, only that most individuals only felt loss. The trenches were where the soldiers resided between the intervals of charging across “No Man’s Land”. Despite it being their only place of half decent security, the overall environment was nothing short of a hole dug in a war zone terraformed by bombs, steel, and chemicals. If there were any other species, it had to be mice. Other than how loud the artilleries and explosions were, how unsanitary the holes were, and how there were limited food rations, it was either all this or a chance at death just a head away from the trenches. Now assuming that one was a survivor for at least a month, he would be help carrying sandbags and digging trenches the majority of the time. If the trenches weren’t enough to break a man’s soul, the charges across “No Man’s Land” ought to. If knowing that you were to die any second while charge straight forward to increase that probability wasn’t terrible, very little else would be. The fact that the opposition were usually already firing at the beginning of the trenches told how low the survival rate was. The collection of dead, torn-apart bodies in the cold, humid atmosphere became the icing on the cake. The transition from life to death was brief. But all of these, according to Fraser, applied to the majority that died early off in the frontlines. There were a minority, often safe within the trenches that were even rewarded with medals due to their survival rate.