The hills of Western Europe bear the physical scars of the First World War. Remnants of the web of trenches that defined the landscape during the conflict remain in both reality and in cultural memory. These trenches became the liminal space between the promising hope of a century
of peace and the bloody twentieth century. French and Belgian dirt was transformed into what so many young men described as Hell on Earth—a bloody inferno of artillery, machine gun, and rifle fire.[1] These elements were ingrained in the memories of all who participated. But one major factor is missing: rats. Despite their direct influence on the lives of soldiers throughout the Western Front, rats have gone largely unnoticed by the historical narrative. Yet combatants wrote about rodents extensively, and they appeared in countless period pieces and cultural outlets. The scourge of rats is inseparable from the identity of the Western Front. [2] They defined the soldier experience and became a central topic of concern both in memoirs and scientific studies beyond the front. Rats also haunted the written works of the time, as poems, books, and films give the soldiers’ posterity a window to
see the rats they lived among. With no escape, Western Front combatants found themselves trapped in both a war of nations and species.

Despite the significant impact that rats had on soldiers, they have slowly fallen out of favor in studies and analyses. Since the end of the Great War, there have been fewer publications dedicated to the ways they defined trench life. Modern research on the trenches continues to focus on their conditions more broadly. Excellent works such as John Ellis’ and Stephen Bull’s analyses of trench warfare only mention rats in short passages, dedicating more time to lice and diseases among the men. The human component in the story of the trenches has also been well explored in books such as Martha Hanna’s Your Death Would Be Mine, an analysis of the complex experiences of Paul and Marie Pireaud throughout the war. A growing body of scholarship has been dedicated to understanding the human impact on the natural world, but few scholars have focused on how nature—especially rats—shaped the everyday lives of soldiers. In sum, the unique form of suffering foisted upon soldier life in the trenches merits further consideration.

On the Western Front, Norwegian rats were the culprits. Also known as brown rats (Rattus norvegicus), they could infiltrate and entrench an area at astounding speeds due to their reproductive cycles. French author and military physician Dr. Paul Chavigny found that this breed could, under
the right conditions, produce a litter of rats every sixty-two days.[3] The trench was the right condition. Natural predators that prevent rat infestations outside of war were driven from the field, and soldiers unwittingly provided the food to sustain such growth. [4] Given these circumstances,
Chavigny estimated that a single pair at the outbreak of war could have as many as twenty million descendants before its end. [5] These rats gorged themselves on the waste and rations of the static armies, growing to unusual sizes. Indeed, some reports indicated cat sized rodents prowling the
Western Front.[6] Chavigny levied many criticisms against the French Army and the ways it contributed to the rat infestation, but he focused his greatest criticism on poor hygiene. Poor hygiene in this case was not defined by the cleanliness of the soldiers, which was understandably lacking, but waste disposal. With no way to properly dispose of their waste, soldiers tossed their discarded ration tins and feces over the top of their trenches, attracting hordes of rats to feast on undefended scraps and human waste. [7] According to British soldier George Coppard: There was no proper system of waste disposal in trench life. Empty tins of all kinds were flung away over the top on both sides of the trench. Teeming millions of tins were thus
available for all the rats in France and Belgium in hundreds of miles of trenches. During brief moments of quiet at night, one could hear a continuous rattle of tins moving against each other. The rats were turning them over. [8] Such sounds echoed through the ears of soldiers during every brief moment of quiet in the night. Bruno Cabanes studied this phenomenon extensively. For soldiers in trenches, each sound was important because any one echo or thud could mean life or death.[9] This is substantiated by accounts from other combatants, like German soldier Ernst Jünger, who noted “This was something that was to accompany us all through the war, that habit of jumping at any sudden and unexpected noise. . . on each occasion, the heart would stop with a sense of mortal dread.” [10] Cabanes concluded that trench warfare forced what he called a “re-ordering of the hierarchy of the senses,” where sound reigned supreme as man’s first defense against sudden death.[11] The importance of sound in relation to rats revolves around their nocturnal nature. Chavigny’s study stressed this when he focused on rats’ night raids for food. [12] Soldiers at the front were unable to defend themselves—or their food—during the time that rats were most active. Soldier exhaustion from artillery barrages and human trench raids made it almost impossible for them to consistently guard food supplies. French soldier Louis Barthas reported that, while taking refuge in a barn, there were “a multitude of rats who. . . came running and chasing each other at nighttime, dancing a farandole on top of us, obliging us to wrap our heads in our blankets and risk suffocating, to protect our noses and our ears.”[13] Soldiers like Jünger and Barthas had to choose between protecting food or sleeping—even when both were needed to win a war. All the while they were still facing the more stereotypical worries of the First World War such as gas attacks.

The relationship between gas attacks and rats is tightly knit. Both caused grave psychological damage to the men of the trenches, appeared without warning, and gas attacks lent the rat mythologized survivability. The soldier and writer Robert Graves’ description of a gas attack shows
its effect on soldiers and the corrosiveness of the weapon. He recounted that there were “men yellow-faced and choking, their buttons tarnished green,” collapsing in the trenches.[14] Each time they returned to the violence of the front from their short breaks, they also had to return to their
war with rats. After British soldier George Coppard returned to Vermelles—a battlefield city 132 miles north of Paris—on 26 October 1915, a pit of fear returned to his stomach. Some of his anxiety came from a very different battle. Unlike many of his compatriots, rats remained at the sight and led
him to believe they had survived the gas.[15] After the release of British gas, it hung over the barren space between the trenches.16 Coppard could have missed the bodies of the rats among those of men, or it is possible that the colonizing rats took to cannibalism, leaving no bodies to see. Either
way, he was sure that the attack had little impact on the inhabitants of no man’s land. Coppard wrote, “What happened to the rats under heavy shell-fire was a mystery, but their powers of survival  kept pace with each new weapon, including poison gas.” [17] This could have had a powerful effect on
soldiers like Coppard. While he was away, Coppard’s fellow soldiers and friends had been left to choke in the gas, but the rat infestation only grew, emboldened by new bodies to devour. Coppard was there for the aftermath, but many soldiers were witnesses to both the attacks and their
consequences. One such soldier, Arthur Empey, wrote of a man that was late with his mask: “he sank to the ground, clutching at his throat, and after a few spasmodic twisting, went West [died].”[18] According to Empey, the worst part of the sight was that there was nothing for the other soldiers to
do. Even after seeing the death of his fellow soldiers, he wrote that “It’s the animals that suffer the most, the horses, mules, cattle, dogs, cats, and rats, they having no helmets [gas masks] to save them. Tommy does not sympathize with rats in a gas attack.”19 Empey, unlike Coppard, directly addresses
the death of the rats at the hands of chemical weapons. His account comes closer to the reality. The rats did not survive the gas due to any super gene—in fact they died to gas easily—but seemed to survive due to their numbers. [20] It is easy to understand why a soldier like Coppard would assume
they were capable of outlasting gas since rats outside of the affected area quickly took their chance to colonize the new land.

Whether soldiers understood the details surrounding their rodent haunters or not, many became desensitized and traumatized by being forced to witness the defilement of fallen soldiers. [21] Robert Graves recounted this multiple times, including a startling story of a new officer who came
face to face with two rats fighting over a severed hand in his bed. [22] There were many ways that men  could have reacted to such a sight, but theirs was one of morbid humor. Soldiers spread the story throughout the regiment and the story then spread through the trenches. Not long after, Graves
found himself the witness to the rats’ work. While treading through no man’s land, he looked into one of the hundreds of craters and saw skeletons. Men who had “been wounded and crept in there to die. . . picked clean by the rats.” [23] This sight was so commonplace that a Canadian soldier believed that if a man was wounded in the wrong place, rats would devour him alive. [24] Soldiers reported that it was often the case that there would be two or three rats lying dead next to a partially devoured corpse—killed either by their overzealous feasting or poisoning—only for more to be found inside the body. [25] French soldier Henri Barbusse described a patrol turned nightmare when:

​

One evening, whilst on patrol, Jacques saw some rats running from under the dead men’s
greatcoats, enormous rats, fat with human flesh. His heart pounding, he edged towards one
of the bodies. Its helmet had rolled off. The man displayed a grimacing face, stripped of
flesh; the skull bare, the eyes devoured. A set of false teeth slid down on to his rotting jacket,
and from the yawning mouth leapt an unspeakably foul beast. [26]

This vivid description of a man being devoured from within was only one of many across the front. Such experiences led to the mental scarring and desensitization of soldiers. The front line was the home of a battle between both nations and species with little hope of a swift conclusion.

​Away from the front line, where men rested without the constant artillery fire, the battle of species continued. Rats were still present wherever men ate or slept. Arthur Empey wrote that the cellars he called shelter were “overrun with large rats. . . Most of the Tommies slept with their overcoats over their faces. I did not. . . The cold, clammy feet of a rat had passed over my face.” [27] Many soldiers recount similar experiences, although the context that one finds them varies wildly. William Yorke Stevenson of the American Ambulance Service mistook the squeaks of rats for the chirping of birds, disturbing his sleep.[28] Stephen Hewett, a member of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, claimed that the trench life was not very difficult with a few exceptions, among those being the broken sleep and rats that came with it. [29] George Coppard wrote that, “When we were sleeping in funk holes the things ran over us, played about, copulated and fouled our craps of food.” [30] Yet another soldier wrote that, “there is nothing very difficult to put up with in ordinary trench life, except the broken hours of sleep. . . and the prevalence of smell, flies, rats, and parasites.”[31] Similarly, Stephen Hewett, a member of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, claimed that the trench life was not very difficult with a few exceptions, among those being the broken sleep and rats that came with it.[32] Sleeplessness was a constant fight against the cacophony of sounds that defined the war. Leo van Bergen tied together the various noises that broke men’s sleep as the squeal of rats only added to the sounds of dying men and horses.33 French soldier Charles Delvert declared:

Now [at night] the rats and the lice are the masters of the house. You can hear the rats
nibbling, running, jumping, rushing from plank to plank, emitting their little squeals behind
the dugout’s corrugated metal. It’s a noisy swarming activity that just won’t stop. [34]

Interactions like Delvert’s happened in dugouts, kitchens, and billets, during breaks in action and in the heat of battle. The rats followed wherever the soldiers went, abandoning their colonies to stay at the heels of the regiments. Their reliance on man was so strong that after a regiment fled their camp in the village of Ancervillers, the strong infestation they wrote about disappeared. The home that housed the field kitchen was evidently the heart of a particularly large colony of rats as there was no end to the evidence of the rats’ former presence.[35] The rats followed the men to their new stations, leaving only their droppings. Alan Seeger, an American member of the Foreign Legion, found himself encountering the vermin when relaxing out of battle. While he was stationed in a quieter area away from the extreme front, he claimed it “seemed so calm that there was no danger.” [36] When a German pilot interrupted his serine rest, he ran for the underground bunkers in the trenches. His experience below the surface led to his poetic analysis: “we live in holes like those that I remember pictured in our old natural histories, that show a gopher, an owl and a snake all living happily together in the same burrow. Here it is men, rats, and vermin.”[37] Seeger found rats everywhere he went, documenting his encounters along the way. In a letter he sent to the New York Sun on 28 April 1915 during a time of “repose and freedom” granted by the relief system, he compared the various trenches and duties in the “petit chateau.”[38] His regiment agreed that there were good and poor positions to be given while on duty. This position was in the defensive trenches and craters that covered the cemetery. This was where he believed fleeing Germans from Aisne made their final stand and where the rats multiplied. The rats found the environment and corpses enticing, and the rodents made their home among the graves. Any soldier given this post would find “the rats as big as rabbits that scurry under the bank and hedges and discourage one from lying down between watches make this the least desirable of all posts.” [39] The rats’ bites could have dire consequences beyond just those of starvation. Frank Percy Crozier wrote that an officer had to be evacuated from an old battlefield for showing symptoms of blood poisoning after having his nose bitten in his
sleep. [40] The mark that the rats made on the experience of soldiers was not limited by direct contact but when they were side by side with soldiers, their tainting effects could spread with something as small as a single bite. From this, quality of life was harmed behind the scenes of war and continued
to assault the men’s psyches. 

The interactions behind the lines and in dugouts were driven by the inescapable limit on the rat population: food. The instincts to survive brought the rats out of no man’s land and into the temporary homes of men in search for the resource. Destruction caused by artillery and small arms
fire did not produce enough to satiate the rats’ hunger. The rodent hoard supplemented their diet with soldier rations yet to be thrown over the edge. George Coppard recounted a rat’s nighttime raid on rations while his platoon was asleep. One rat stood on top of a soldier’s head and tore open a
sandbag of peas that hung from the ceiling. [41] The pandemonium that ensued ruined the limited sleep his comrades could expect. Rats were without fear in the face of human shelters, guns, and soldiers in their search for food. For the Triple Entente forces, there were many problems stemming from
the rats’ consumption of rations, but the Germans had to face this battle alongside fewer food supplies. Ernst Jünger wrote:
Aside from rather watery soup at lunchtime, there was just a third of a loaf of bread with an
offensively small quantity of ‘spread’, which usually consisted of half-off jam. And half of my
portion was invariably stolen by a fat rat, which I often vainly tried to catch.[42]

French Corporal Luis Barthas went into further detail regarding these battles over food. One incident he wrote of from September 1915 showed the roguishness of rat strategy. [43] Barthas and his fellow soldiers awoke to find their rations consumed without being capable of stopping it. What is
worse, however, is the dejected manner in which his fellow soldiers treated their unenviable situation while stationed in a barn at Condé-en-Barrois. Here, he returned after a long day to rest, but he was interrupted by scampering vermin. “All along the wall, the roof beams, the ground, brushing up
against me,” Barthas lamented, “nibbling, gnawing, with little yelps of joy, along my legs, across my body, my face—all the rats of the neighborhood, gathering for their daily feast.” [44] The source of attraction for the rats was a series of bags filled with oats along the wall. After attempting to swat a
rat away from their feast with his club, an even larger rodent replaced it, causing Barthas to give up on the attempt. Being the only soldier to try to save the rations out of the two hundred men stationed in the barn, he wondered why neither the owners nor his fellow soldiers acted to protect
them. The lost hope in protecting food is encapsulated in his answer, “I stopped wondering when, the next day, a neighbor told me that these oats had already been requisitioned and paid for. So if they went into the mouths of rats or of horses, what difference did it make?” [45] Soldiers did not just
value rest more than the food. Their unwillingness to fight the swarm was due to the food being rationed away from them. It was then hard to justify the night-long fight just to save a fraction of the feed that would be taken away from them either way. An army is only as fast as its supply lines,
which in the First World War were still largely based around horses. This reality meant that, for these soldiers, their need for rest was stronger than the abstract gain of protecting it. It is also possible that the rats’ focus being on the large store of food gave them a short break from their
bites. [46]

While many found it difficult to find the energy to fight against the rats that infested their living spaces, others attempted every manner of extermination possible. There was a myriad of methods used to do this, but success rates varied wildly. Individual soldiers often followed in
Coppard’s footsteps, firing on rats when they were able. This practice was ubiquitous with many soldiers’ experiences at the front on both sides of the war. German soldier Ernst Jünger partook in a game of sorts, as he described it. To deal with the rodents that found plentiful food in the form of
German bread rations, he and his fellow soldiers packed empty cartridges with a small amount of black powder and a paper pellet.[47 ]They would then fire on the rats with these lethal makeshift pellets, both providing an invaluable service to the troops and finding a way to spend the hours.
They took care not to waste rounds on the pests in their sport due to limited ammunition.

Outside of such “sport,” there were calculated efforts on behalf of the soldiers to reduce the rat population. Trapping was common throughout the front. This simple, straightforward attempt to kill the rats was less than ideal because the traps had to be reset after each victim or they risked rats
escaping from perpetual traps.[48] The perpetual trap mechanism was developed for the front a few times, but each worked the same way. The rat lifted a hatch to get to bait underneath, but once inside, ideally the rat could not open it. [49] Given the limitations of this method, soldiers struggled to utilize traps to any effective degree. Jünger wrote that the steel traps he and his comrades used were likely to be dragged away by the rats due to the rodents’ immense size and strength.[50] This, of  course, all relies on the rats falling for the trick, but there were times when they did not take the bait,
rendering the traps completely useless. [51] An account from German dragoon commander Rudolf Binding’s A Fatalist at War incapsulates the difficult task of tricking the rats. Being tired of the “great nuisance” of the trenches, one German soldier attempted to “watch the way in which a rat would
catch itself in the trap he had set.” The rat refused to approach, prompting the soldier to sleep with the trap on his stomach so that he could be awoken to see the rat’s fate. No rats took him up on his offer; instead he was startled by a shell that sprung the trap. [52] It is evident that this method of rat
eradication left much to be desired and that soldiers needed to find other methods if they wished to rid themselves of their rodent neighbors.

Contemporary scientific journals recount these other methods and underscored the lengths that soldiers went to free themselves. A 1916 article published in the Scientific American, notably before the United States’ entry into the war, describes a few methods used by French soldiers. When
resources were available, soldiers were able to be more creative with their solutions, believing they found an ingenious solution by using crumpled sponges in a mixture with bait for rats to eat. After the bait was taken, a water source would be made available. [53] After drinking their fill, the rats would, as the plan went, be killed by the internal pressure and blockages as the sponges expanded. This would also be done if the soldiers had access to plaster of paris and flour which could be mixed into a substance with similar expansive properties. In the modern day, varieties of this method are used
as a form of homemade rat poison, although studies have found that there is limited success with the use of plaster. [54] Chemical poisons saw more success, though in limited applications. Common chemicals used included arsenic, barium, and phosphorus, but it was found later that the rats were able to smell these chemicals making the ratios of food to poison used in bait very important. The mixture had to be perfectly calculated so that the concentration would be a lethal dose without being enough for the rats to smell or taste.[55]

When poisoned bait was not desired, gases were deployed. However, as previously seen, rats could replenish their numbers quickly enough to render the effects of gas attacks across the battlefield ineffective. When introduced into individual burrows, though, asphyxiating gases were
found to be extraordinarily effective. Calcium carbide, for example, could be used along with water to form a gas that could clear out an entire den, meaning that particularly troublesome groups of rats could be removed.[56] Paul Chavigny noted that this method would have been very effective on a
larger scale if not for the length of the Front. The most effective gases on the rat population could not be contained in a battlefield setting, and, if disbursed in large quantities, represented a danger to the soldiers who already had to contend with enemy gas attacks. [57] They would also have to be
released across the entire Western Front at the same time to prevent neighboring populations from invading the newly evicted area. Despite the promising theory, gas had to be limited to only those dens that needed to be moved most.  Limitations based on proximity to human life made eradication difficult across the front, but the introduction of domesticated animals had mixed results. While the introduction of natural
predators was unsuccessful, as the conditions that drove them away were still present, properly trained dogs were successful in battling the rodents. [58] Throughout the beginning of the war, dogs such as fox terriers accompanied soldiers as a form of deterrent for the rats. [59] These dogs were  found to be effective only if two conditions were met: the dog had to be properly trained in hunting the vermin and its trainer had to be familiar with this type of hunt.[60] Sometimes a rat dog could dislodge rats from a building through its presence alone, although this was not as common as soldiers had hoped .[61] However much of the time the expectations proved to be too much for the soldiers and dogs, leading to the slow disappearance of rat dogs from the trenches. Their varied success can be found in the private papers of Captain J. I. Cahen where he describes his dog as having a “splendid scent for the rats, and is a good sportsman.”62 Other times they failed their task. As William Yorke Stevenson described his troop’s rat dog, “‘Vic,’ the fox terrier which we got for protection against the rats, is more scared of them than we are.” [63] The once commonplace dog was relatively rare near the end of the war due to their unpredictable successes. [64] Even more rare—but still notable—was the use of ferrets in the British trenches. Although they did find great success along the British portion of the Western Front, their increasing cost and very limited supply caused their usage to end. [65] Lastly, the simplest strategy was the assignment of ratcatchers. These men would be tasked with only one job, as their name implied, but were less than ideal. The difficulty of their job led to greater agitation of the rats they hunted. This method sometimes only caused more issues for the, as the rats would be driven from their holes and into the spaces the soldiers inhabited. [66] Given the limitations placed on each of the methods, none of them found great success in eradicating the population of rats in the trenches. The disappointing results of Chavigny’s study explained that large-scale measures were unlikely to be successful, delegating the solution instead to be reliant on every individual soldier to better their hygiene when possible.

The variety of methods, however unsuccessful they were, shed light on the thought process of the soldiers. For men who were fighting in the first global industrial war to take the time and effort to experiment shows a sense of urgency. The conditions to which the rats contributed became
the center of trench culture and social life. Given the failure of each of the methods of eradication, there was nothing but time to adjust and cope with the rat population as the soldiers made the Front their home. [68]

It was difficult for soldiers to find time to adjust psychologically to the rats as they came across them through every form of labor at the front. Digging brought soldiers into constant contact with corpses and the rats that feasted on them in the shallow mud. [69] The commonality of these
discoveries led to the further destruction of their mental states. One incident from Empey’s memoir shows this destruction in horrific detail. After several days of German attacks, soldiers' remains littered the ground around the trench and rotted due to the lack of quiet for burial. The result was a
foot that emerged from the side of the trench which had a profound influence on Empey’s mental health. He thought that he could see it move in the night and several times went to grasp it, only to find it was dead and unmoving. When it was removed, he felt a sudden sense of dread and loss as if
a friend was killed. He likened its presence to something more than a corpse, almost like a companion in suffering. The dead around him harmed him in ways that modern readers could not understand. He wrote, “I think the worst thing of all was to watch the rats, at night, and sometimes in the day, run over and play about among the dead.” [70] Of all the problems that he faced on the front line, rats stood out. Empey witnessed every form of gruesome death, but, he claimed, the corpse-defiling rats were the worst.

The stress that rats caused soldiers fueled a wave of creative works both during and after the war. War-time poetry was one of the few outlets for soldiers in a time before modern communication technology. Alongside their poet comrades, authors also put their thoughts to ink.
The emotions captured in poetry and novels helped many soldiers come to terms with their experiences and the place that rats hold within their work allows readers to understand their attempts to make sense of a conflict with humans and rats alike. Isaac Rosenberg, an Anglo-Jewish
poet, made rats the main character in his 1916 work “Break of Day in the Trenches.” The poem is one long stanza without pause or any particular rhyming scheme. The unbroken thoughts of the soldier gave anthropomorphic abilities to rats who might do what the soldiers could not. In the
narrator’s melancholy, he says:

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German...

The ability of the rat to travel no man’s is portrayed as something to be envied as Rosenberg wrote that it “seems you [the rat] inwardly grin as you pass.” He describes the rat as a strong, able-bodied animal that stood the test of war. This lively description and humanization of the rodent is in stark
contrast to his description of the soldier’s situation. Tucking a poppy—a common symbol of peace—behind his ear he thinks of keeping it safe. It is safe from the fate of poppies “whose roots are in man’s veins,” feeding on the dead. [71]

Other poems hammered home the horror that the rats instilled into the authors. British soldier Richard Aldington wrote a short poem that was from the point of view of a poet. The short stanza told of rats that interrupted his writing of a haiku.
One frosty night when the guns were still
I leaned against the trench
Making for myself ‘hokku’
Of the moon and flowers and of the snow:
But the ghastly scurrying of huge rats
Swollen with feeding upon men’s flesh
Filled me with shrinking dread.[72]
Here the invasiveness of the rats shines through. A poet himself, Aldington made a purposeful decision in the otherwise peaceful setting. Even when there was not an immediate threat of gunfire, the rats were enough to fill a man with fear. The fear that was capable of inspiring tortured art,
where the author confesses his fears and his experiences. Even a work so short tells a reader how awful a sight these rats were.

These sights were even more well described in a poem by Edward Tennant. In the poem “The Mad Soldier,” written three months before his death in battle, Tennant provided the thoughts of a soldier who lied, stuck under bodies after a battle.[73] With a body draped over his, the narrator laments the reality that he found himself in. The field of bodies attracted rats which the soldier interrogates the bodies about. He asked:
Do you know what these rats eat? Body-meat!
After you’ve been down a week, an’ your cheek
Gets as pale as life, and night seems as white
As the day, only the rats and their brats
Seem more hungry when the day’s gone away —
An’ they look big as bulls, an’ they pulls
Till you almost sort O’ shout...[74]
The soldier, who is likely dead, fell three weeks before the poem’s action. The implication of this section is horrifying. The narrator has become the source of “body-meat” that the rats ate, as evident by the line “they pulls till you almost sort o’ shout.” This implies that the soldier is the one
being pulled on. This poem imagines of what it would be like to fall victim to the rats at the Battle of Loos. The effect that this battle had on Tennant was great and he imagined himself in the place of one of his fallen comrades. The possibility of survivor’s guilt and his perception of the rats mixed to
create a bone-chilling poem that deserves more credit for its exploration of both the mind of a survivor and of the rats of the trench. Tennant’s death after the war did not stop his mind being opened to the world as his poems were able to be published. Being inspired by the horrors of battle,
his fiction was short and impactful. Other creative minds made use of longer-form works to explore their experiences, and these authors made their own contributions to the literary world.

Le Feu, written by Henri Barbusse and first published in L’Œuvre in 1916, tells the story of the French Sixth Battalion throughout the war.75 A rare antiwar novel nationally published during the time of the Battle of the Somme, it provided insight into the war experience for the French
public. This meant exposing the reality of mental anguish that soldiers felt when witnessing the loss of their brothers in arms. He wrote:
When you hear of or see the death of one of those who fought by your side and lived exactly the same life, you receive a direct blow in the flesh before even understanding. It is truly as if one heard of his own destruction. It is only later that one begins to mourn. We look at the hideous head that is murder’s jest, the murdered head already and cruelly effacing our memories of Cocon. Another comrade less. We remain there around
him, afraid. This poetic portrait of war-time mourning came after he discovered his comrade, Cocon, dead in the mud. Among the fallen, Volpatte, one of the squad members, revealed that rats shared the mud with the dead. Volpatte explained that the rodents “talk” to the older corpses and that they could be found laid out around every body or under them. He took no time to prove his point as he raised the foot of a fallen soldier to reveal two dead rats in the mud. With such a powerful response to death, the visions of rats within bodies deeply affected soldiers. This work of semi-fiction allowed
for Barbusse to let out the pain he experienced at the front before he was removed from the front in 1917 and placed in a clerical position due to injuries and illness. His novel won the Prix Goncourt and was hailed after the war for its exploration of the soldier experience, especially the pain soldiers suffered from every aspect of the front. The memory Barbusse infused into history was so impactful that Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1942: “The only good war book to come out during the last war was Under Fire by Henri Barbusse.” [76] 

German Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the best-known novels borne from the trials of the First World War. Based on Remarque’s experiences and those of his friends, his narrative captured the horrors of war in ways that still captivate readers today. Rats
play a role in this story as they torment the boys. Remarque described them as having “shocking, evil naked faces,” and that it was “nauseating to see their long, nude tails.” The new soldiers had to fight for their food, mimicking the real-life accounts in both method and outcome. One of the soldiers,
Kropp, hung his bread from the ceiling of their dugout after nights of having his bread stolen in the night. He awoke not to a safe piece of food, but to a rat swinging around his head with its teeth sunk into it. They also frightened the men en masse as one night a “swarm of fleeing rats” stormed their
dugout, driving the men mad and they began to strike at each other until they realized it was a rat invasion and not one of the French raiding parties. The excitement the rats caused kept them from sleeping during the short moments they had, contributing to the mental break seen by one of the
young boys. During a shell attack on the German line, the recruit stood and tried to leave the dugout. As he was stopped, he shouted, “Leave me alone, let me go out, I will go out!” Later the same night, another soldier jumped and tried to run out. He was not stopped in time and took a
direct hit, scattering “smoking splinters, lumps of flesh, and bits of uniform.” Though fiction, this is far from a made-up idea. Mental breaks like this are caused by trauma, stress, and desperation. The fate of this soldier is not imagined or far from reality. Men watched their friends throughout the war
have similar episodes and similar ends, scarring them and inflicting more pain on them. With such horrifying sights, it is not surprising that rats seeped into the consciousness of war-time authors alongside the episodes of mental distress. [77] This has since defined the war for those that were born

in the era of its aftermath, and the ways that they have envisioned it.

Modern audiences often interact with the First World War less through the poetry and novels and more through film. Some films were based on previous works, such as the 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front and its 2022 remake. Both films used their visual scenes to explore soldier
during the war and rats take their place in each of their narratives. This allows for the embracing of the commonality of rats in the trenches as well as the fear that soldiers held for them. Like the novel that shares its name, the 1930’s film All Quiet on the Western Front reveals the realities
of war and the suffering that it wrought on soldiers. Like the novel, the struggle for food is seen but more mildly. A rat appears for Kat to throw a boot at it and yell, “That’s Oscar!” In reaction to complaints about the rations, one of the soldiers replies with “Don’t be so snooty, you may wish you
had this back. After about two more days of this [the artillery barrage], this rat-bitten piece of bread’s going to taste like a hunk of fruitcake.”78 The 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front used rats in a more heavy-handed manner to explore the realities of the war. In scene 86, found on
page 58 of the film’s script, rats foreshadow one of the most tragic events of the film. A swarm of rats passes Paul, Kat, and Tjaden as they are eating abandoned French rations in an underground kitchen. The ground that was completely obscured by the swarm began to tremble and shake.
Accompanied by cinematography and the actors’ reactions, the onslaught of French tanks began. The rats foreshadowed the death of multiple named characters, and this was the scene that earned the remake its R rating as the gore of war was shown without any kind of censor. [79] Each version of the film has the same goal—to represent the anguish of war. Both make excellent use of symbolism and acting to create masterclasses in antiwar fiction.

A generation of men lost their lives in the trenches, both literally and mentally. Trench warfare defined their experience, and their conditions dictated the way that they lived and died. It is clear from soldiers both during and after the war that rats made up a large part of their collective
existence and memory. From the perspective of the soldier on the ground, rats represented a much larger threat than they did at any other point in their lives. Rats interfered with every aspect of life from fighting to sleeping. The conditions needed for such rat infestations, as dictated by Chavigny,
were made possible by the trenches. Soldiers had to fight a now-forgotten war among their own ranks, attempting to eradicate, and later learning to live among the rats. The battles they fought only made the rat situation worse, as bombardments, gas attacks, and every other aspect of industrial war
created an even more rat-friendly environment. Most living things were destroyed under these circumstances, except for the vermin that bred in the millions atop the bodies of men. The soldiers could not contend with the rats in their fight against them, every tactic of extermination failing. In
the end their numbers would only be quelled by the end of the war. It is little wonder why soldiers then wrote of them so extensively. This forgotten war with rats ought no longer to be relegated to the margins of First World War history. Artillery, gas, and guns, dramatically impacted soldier life
and psyche, but, in so many cases, so, too, did the humble rat. Given their ability to destroy so much and yet define every day of the First World War, it is impossible to view them as anything other than a generational defining force that has been unjustly forgotten.