For most soldiers, there was nothing glamorous or heroic about this war. For the British, for example, the trenches were two things above all, wet and smelly. The dampness came from the fact that the British trenches were in the wettest part of Flanders. The smell was mainly decomposing flesh. Nothing glorious about that. On the upside, soldiers were at least rarely hungry, and there was a lot of food from home, which is worth underscoring because it reminds us that home wasn't very far away. Even for the British, at their closest, the front was only 70 miles from England.