(See how World War I energized mapmaking at National Geographic.) Photographed in 1917, an endless line of Russian soldiers sit patiently in a trench as they anticipate a German attack. National ...

"Every fracture in this war is a huge open wound," one American doctor reported, "with a not merely broken but shattered bone at the bottom of it." The very nature of trench warfare, moreover ...

Soldiers were encouraged to wash their feet regularly and often had their feet inspected. On the Western Front, the war was fought by soldiers in trenches. Trenches were long, narrow ditches dug ...

After weeks of digging, the area around the small town of Medvedivka, near a crossing to mainland Ukraine, is webbed with an elaborate trench system stretching several miles. The passages are cut ...

you can trace grass-covered trenches and pockmarks from exploded bombshells. More than a million men were wounded or killed in the battle, the first major British offensive of the war.