In 1914 railways could move millions of soldiers in days, but once they left the railhead they marched no faster than a Roman legion. Germany’s modified Schlieffen Plan sent armies through neutral Belgium, smashing the Liège forts with super-heavy howitzers and executing civilians in reprisals the press called the rape of Belgium. Exhausted troops who had outrun their horse-drawn supply were stopped at the First Battle of the Marne, fell back to the Aisne and dug in, and the race to the sea ended with trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps. Machine guns and rapid-fire artillery made open ground uncrossable, so armies turned to new weapons, beginning with chlorine at the Second Battle of Ypres.
By 1916 the goal became attrition. Erich von Falkenhayn aimed to bleed France white at Verdun, and the British opened the Somme after a seven-day bombardment of more than a million and a half shells that left the wire and deep German dugouts intact. Early tanks broke down in the mud, Germany pulled back to the Hindenburg Line, and the failed Nivelle offensive of 1917 brought mutinies to 54 French divisions that refused to attack but kept holding the line. Mines at Messines gave way to the mud and mustard gas of Passchendaele. Germany’s 1918 storm troopers broke through, then outran their supplies, and Ferdinand Foch’s unified command answered with combined arms at Amiens.
- Chlorine at Ypres tore a gap almost four miles wide, but German commanders had not massed reserves and Canadian troops sealed it.
- Roland Garros bolted steel deflector plates to his propeller, and Anthony Fokker studied his captured plane and invented a synchronization gear tied to the engine’s camshaft.
- The French rotated 42 divisions through Verdun, where combined casualties reached about 700,000.
- British coal miners spent over a year digging under Messines Ridge and packed 21 mines with 500 tons of explosives.
- Starving German soldiers in the 1918 Spring Offensive stopped to eat the food in captured British depots.
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