Description: Those iron stakes laboriously driven into the ground in the black of night and as laboriously strung with barbed wire are a part of the defenses that the Bulgarian soldiers erected to hold back the Allies along the fighting front, north of Saloniki.
The upper ends of those stakes which you see have a loop in them to hold the wire and the ends are sharpened in order that they may prove dangerous to the advancing soldiers, even when partly leveled by artillery fire. The function of barbed wire defense is to delay the advancing soldiers by catching their clothing or tearing their flesh. The other ends of these iron stakes, the ends that are driven into the ground, are shaped like a corkscrew in order that they may be firmly imbedded in the soil.
You can estimate the depth of this barbed wire defense and understand how impossible it would be for soldiers to advance through it in the face of hostile fire. For that reason an attack on trenches defended in this manner was seldom attempted without a fierce preliminary bombardment with high explosive shells to level the wire or to open lanes through it in order that the infantry could advance with a degree of speed great enough to reach the trenches before being shot down.
- Excerpt from: The World War through the stereoscope a visualized, vitalized history of the greatest conflict of all the ages / / edited by Major Joseph Mills Hanson.
- Published/Created by: Meadville, Pa.; New York, N.Y.; Chicago, Ill.; London, England:
- Keystone View Company, photographed between 1914 and 1918, published 1923
- Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
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