In August 1914 most soldiers and civilians expected a short war, over by Christmas. German armies swept through Belgium and into northern France, following the Schlieffen plan's great wheeling movement toward Paris. Belgian and British resistance slowed them, and the plan's timetable began to slip.
From movement to stalemate
In early September, with German forces within about 50 kilometres of Paris, French and British troops counterattacked. The First Battle of the Marne, in September 1914, stopped the German advance and ended hopes of a quick victory in the west. The Germans fell back to high ground along the River Aisne and dug in. Each side then tried to get around the other's northern flank, a series of moves called the race to the sea. By November a continuous line of trenches ran from the North Sea coast of Belgium to the Swiss border, more than 700 kilometres long. For most of the next three and a half years it would move only a few miles either way.
Life in the trenches
A trench system was not one ditch but a maze. Front line trenches were dug in a zigzag pattern so that an enemy who got in could not fire straight along them. Behind them ran support and reserve lines, joined by communication trenches. Between the opposing front lines lay no man's land, the strip of cratered ground and barbed wire between the two sides' trenches, sometimes a few hundred metres wide, sometimes only a few dozen.
Soldiers usually rotated: some days in the front line, then in support, then in reserve or at rest behind the lines. Daily life was mostly boredom, digging, carrying supplies and repairing wire at night, broken by moments of terror. Rats, lice and mud were constant. Standing for days in cold water caused trench foot, which could lead to amputation.
The strain on minds was enormous. In 1915 the British doctor Charles Myers used the term "shell shock" for soldiers who suffered tremors, paralysis, or loss of speech or memory after bombardment. At first many officers suspected weakness or cowardice, and some men who broke down were punished. Over time doctors came to see shell shock as a real psychological injury caused by war, an early step toward what is now called post traumatic stress disorder.
Humanity surfaced too. In the Christmas truce of 1914, soldiers on parts of the front stopped fighting on their own initiative, sang carols, swapped food and souvenirs and met in no man's land, where some played football. Commanders on both sides disapproved and made sure such truces were never repeated on that scale.
Why attacks failed
Generals faced a real problem: defense was stronger than attack. Defenders sat in dug in positions with machine guns and barbed wire, while attackers had to cross open ground. Even when attackers broke into the enemy line, defenders could rush reserves forward by railway faster than attackers could advance men, guns and shells across the shattered ground they had just won. Radios were heavy and unreliable, so commanders lost touch with their troops once an attack began.
Verdun and the Somme
The year 1916 produced the two most famous battles of the Western Front. At Verdun, beginning in February 1916, the German commander Erich von Falkenhayn aimed to bleed the French army through attrition, attacking a place he believed France would defend at any cost. France did, under the slogan "They shall not pass." The battle lasted until December and cost about 700,000 casualties on the two sides together, for very little change in the line.
Partly to relieve Verdun, the British and French attacked along the River Somme on 1 July 1916. The British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, hoped a week long bombardment would destroy the German defenses. It did not: many shells were duds, the wire was often left uncut, and the Germans sheltered in deep dugouts. On the first day of the Somme, the British army suffered about 57,000 casualties, including some 19,000 killed, the bloodiest day in its history. The battle went on until November and cost more than a million casualties on all sides.
Worked example: judging the first day of the Somme
Picture a battalion of volunteers from one northern English town, recruited together as a "Pals" battalion. At 7:30 a.m. the whistles blow and they climb out, walking in lines because planners feared inexperienced troops would lose order if they ran. German machine gunners, emerging from their deep shelters, open fire. Within minutes most of the battalion is dead or wounded, and in the weeks that follow a single town receives hundreds of telegrams.
How should we judge it? One view, popular since the 1960s, holds that brave soldiers were thrown away by callous and incompetent generals, with Haig as the chief villain. Other historians, such as Gary Sheffield, argue that the Somme was a terrible but necessary learning process that taught the British army methods it used to win in 1918, and that it also wore down the German army. A fair judgment can hold both: the planning for 1 July contained serious, avoidable errors, and the problem the planners faced had no easy answer. Asking which is true of a particular decision is how history moves beyond slogans.