318 Chapter Nine
would turn out to be correct. The Schlieffen plan unrolled almost as
the Great General Staff had hoped. German troops turned back the
French attack in Lorraine and the Russian advance into East Prussia
while their main force, having beaten back the British and Belgians,
wheeled across the Low Countries and prepared to encircle the
French. But men and horses were stretched to the limit by such
marching and fighting; and the French broke off their own offensive in
time to launch a major counterattack on the Marne (6–12 September
1914). Accordingly, on 9 September the Germans began to withdraw.
Three days later, stalemate set in between exhausted armies, each
sheltering in lines of hastily constructed trenches. Ammunition was
desperately short at the front, and so were other supplies. Worse still,
the tactical stalemate became general in ensuing weeks when repeated
efforts to outflank the foe merely prolonged the line of trenches until
it became continuous, stretching across France from the Swiss border
in the south to a small corner of Belgium in the north. Thereafter the
Western Front remained almost stationary for four dreary years, de
spite enormous efforts on each side to find a way to break through.
This untoward result presented the belligerents with totally unex
pected problems. To keep going was difficult; to give up was im
possible. As a result, the belligerents were impelled to improvise
means to sustain the rival armies, month after month, feeding,
equipping, supplying, training, healing, and burying men literally by
the millions. Nothing like it had ever been done before. No wonder
ancient customs and institutions withered, while new methods and
maxims everywhere prevailed.
Of the major belligerents, France was the most drastically affected
by the first weeks of war. Initial loss of life was very heavy^24 and
the economy came close to foundering. France’s crisis was worsened
by the fact that when the front stabilized, the part of the country
behind German lines was especially important as a source of coal and
iron—the sinews of armament manufacture.^25 Even in those arms
plants that remained safely behind French lines, manpower was lack
- The cult of the offensive had been held very high in the prewar French army with
the result that charges across open country in face of magazine rifle and machine gun fire
killed about 640,000 men between 1 August and 1 December 1914, according to
Joseph Montheilet, Les institutions militaires de la France, 1814–1924 (Paris, 1932),
p. 350. This initial bloodbath amounted to nearly half of French losses during the whole
war.
- No less than 64 percent of French pig iron capacity and 26 percent of French steel
capacity was in German hands, together with 85 out of 170 blast furnaces. Cf. Robert
Pinot, Le Comité des Forges en service de la nation (Paris, 1919), p. 76.
