Gordons Preparing Barbed Wire Entanglements

This blue-tinted news film joins a group of kilted Gordon Highlands undertaking one of the least popular but most essential jobs on the WWI front line: creating barbed wire entanglements. These makeshift fences ran parallel with trenches, but sufficiently far removed to act as a deterrent to a grenade-bearing enemy. They were also very resistant to bombardment, which often made them even more tangled. The WWI-era song The Old Barbed Wire crystallised soldiers' abiding fear of encountering it the hard way.

Barbed wire was introduced in Illinois in 1874 for herding cattle, but its military potential soon became obvious, whether via full-scale entanglements or simpler arrangements such as a single strand from which tin cans containing stones were hung - a makeshift but effective alarm system. Wire cutters quickly became standard battalion equipment, although it usually took so long to make a useful difference that whoever was using them became a sitting target for machine-gunners. It took the introduction of the tank in 1916 to change this, its caterpillar tracks trampling all before it.