Hello and welcome to War — 1870 to 1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Season Two: World War One — The Age of Attrition. Episode Two: 1915 — Trenches, Stalemate, and the Invention of Modern Suffering.

By the start of 1915 the great illusion of 1914 had already collapsed, but it hadn’t been replaced by clarity. What replaced it was something worse: a kind of stubborn fog. Leaders, generals, newspapers, and ordinary people all felt—without quite saying it out loud—that the war was going to be longer and darker than promised. But nobody yet had a new story strong enough to hold what was happening. And when humans don’t have a story that fits reality, they keep using the old one. They keep using words like “breakthrough” and “decisive battle,” even as the ground itself is telling them a different truth.

That truth was etched into the earth along the Western Front: trenches. Not heroic trenches. Not romantic trenches. Trenches as engineering, trenches as imprisonment, trenches as habitat. The trench system in France and Belgium became a vast, living scar—hundreds of miles of ditches, dugouts, parapets, sandbags, wire, and mud. It wasn’t one trench, it was layers: a front line, support trenches, reserve trenches, all connected by narrow communication trenches that twisted like arteries. Behind them sat batteries of artillery and supply roads. In front of them sat barbed wire and the open killing ground of no man’s land. The entire landscape became a machine designed to absorb human bodies and convert them into casualties.