The study carried out at Goldsmiths, University of London found that across the British army on the Western Front infantry soldiers spent a maximum of 47% of their time at the front or fighting.
The infantry engaged directly with the enemy on just one in five of their days abroad.
The research uses data from the first stage of Operation War Diary, led by The National Archives (TNA), Imperial War Museums (IWM) and academic crowdsourcing research group, Zooniverse, based at the University of Oxford.
27,000 volunteers extracted metadata from digitised war diary entries dating to 1914-1918, which are held in The National Archives. The volunteers produced over half a million data classifications for six infantry divisions and two cavalry divisions. The largest previous study examined just one infantry division.
“Even with less than half your time spent at the front and around one out of five days actually under fire, nobody should doubt that conditions were horrendous,” explains Professor Richard Grayson, Professor of Twentieth Century History who carried out the study adding:
“But our research shows that popular representations of soldiers spending all day and night in the trenches – whether it’s in Blackadder, on the BBC Schools pages, or popular histories and broadcasts – do not properly represent the broad pattern of the daily lives of soldiers.”
It is also worth noting that these average figures mask some remarkably lengthy periods at the front by some units. For example, among the battalions examined so far in OWD, the 1st East Lancashires were almost entirely in the line between 21 October 1914 and 11 April 1915.
