892 Ch. 22 • The Great War
had planned. The British poured through another gap between German
armies, forcing the Germans to retreat forty miles to the Aisne River. There,
on September 14, the Germans fortified their position by digging deep
defensive trenches. Like the Battle of Valmy in 1792 during the French Rev
olution, the Battle of the Marne saved France in 1914.
The Germans then tried to outflank the Bj^tish and French forces in
what amounted to a race for the sea, as the Allied armies kept pace, hold
ing much of Picardy and Flanders, before both sides ran out of space. The
British and French, too, dug in.
A series of attacks and counterattacks in the fall took frightful tolls, with
neither side able to break through. In November 1914, the last open battle
of the western front was fought in the mud around Ypres in Belgium;
British forces prevented the Germans from reaching the French Channel
ports. By the end of the year, the German and French armies had combined
casualties of 300,000 killed and 600,000 wounded. The British Seventh
Division arrived in France in October with 400 officers and 12,000 sol
diers; after eighteen days of fighting around Ypres, it had 44 officers and
2,336 men left. In a special British battalion of football players, originally
brought together to play exhibition matches near the front and then sent
to fight like everybody else, only 30 of 200 men survived.
The Changing Nature of War
The German and Allied armies stared at each other across a broad front
that reached from the English Channel to Switzerland. Two long, thin lines
of trenches ended dreams of rapid victory based upon a mastery of offen
sive tactics. Few analysts had considered the possibility of a frozen front
that would rarely move more than a few hundred yards in either direction
and along which several million soldiers would die.
Besides trench warfare, new weapons dramatically changed the nature of
battle. During the war, poison gas, hand grenades, flamethrowers, tanks,
military airplanes, and submarines entered the arsenals of both sides. A new
scale of warfare required an unparalleled, total mobilization of the home
front to sustain the war effort.Trench WarfareSpades for digging trenches and rows of tangled barbed wire became more
important than the rifle and bayonet, weapons of attack. Soldiers on both
sides dug about 6,250 miles of trench in France. The front-line trenches
were six to eight feet deep and about fifty yards to a mile apart. They were
supplemented by support trenches several hundred yards to the rear and
linked by communications trenches. Small fortress-like “strong points”
held the line together even if part of the system was overrun. Sandbags and