The long and dismal annals of European military history had seen nothing comparable with the western front. British troops likened it to a "great sausage machine", consuming lives in the hundreds of thousands while remaining stubbornly in place. From autumn 1914 two opposing lines of trenches stretched some 475 miles from Switzerland to the Channel coast. Offensives staged by both sides saw maximum advances of just six miles up until Spring 1918. These events still fall - just - within the memory of human beings now living. How could they have happened?
It was not meant to be like this. We now know that many planners foresaw that a European conflict, far from being over by Christmas, would be long and bloody. Yet the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 had demonstrated that while entrenched defenders with modern firepower could wreak havoc on advancing infantry, the attackers could still eventually prevail. Berlin's war plan - conventionally dubbed the Schlieffen Plan after the strategist who devised it, though subsequently much modified - envisaged sending most of the German army westwards and invading Belgium to outflank France's border fortresses. Its French counterpart, Plan XVII, also provided for an opening attack, yet proved disastrous. Germany, briefly, seemed closer to victory than it ever would again. In contrast to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, however, the French commander, Joseph Joffre, kept his nerve and redeployed his forces via a network of strategic railways. The Germans, conversely, were up to 100 miles beyond their railheads in September when the French counter-attacked at the Battle of the Marne. And also unlike 1870, this time the French were fighting not alone but alongside Russia and Britain. Once they had stopped the initial enemy break-in, the military balance would move their way.
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