Battle of the Aisne ends

On 15 September 1914, according to the British chronicle of the war, the Battle of the Aisne came to an end. The British later took it to have lasted from 12 to 15 September, although the fighting on the heights above the river dragged on until the end of the month. After four days of attacks it became clear that the Allies would not drive the Germans from the positions they held. Both sides began digging trenches, and trench warfare was beginning on the Western Front.

The attack on the heights

After the retreat from the Marne the German First and Second Armies halted on the north bank of the Aisne, on the steep, wooded slopes of the plateau along which runs the road known as the Chemin des Dames. The Allies, who had opened the Battle of the Aisne on 12 September, reckoned that the enemy was still retreating and that it was enough to keep pursuing him.

On 13 September units of the British Expeditionary Force crossed the river on damaged bridges, footbridges and pontoon bridges. The next day General Douglas Haig’s I Corps struck towards the Chemin des Dames. The British forced their way onto the plateau, but in fog and rain they ran into strong resistance and German counter-attacks. To their left the French Sixth Army was attacking north of Soissons, and to their right the French Fifth Army near Craonne and Reims. Nowhere did they manage to break the German defence.

The Germans close the gap

At the last moment the Germans managed to plug the gap between their armies that had sealed their defeat on the Marne. On 13 September VII Reserve Corps, freed after the capitulation of Maubeuge and brought up by forced march, reached the Chemin des Dames. Soon the new Seventh Army of General Josias von Heeringen, made up of troops transferred from Alsace and Lorraine, arrived at the front. The German soldiers quickly dug in on the ridges, and their machine guns and artillery dominated the river valley.

The beginning of trench warfare

On the morning of 15 September the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal Sir John French, concluded that the Germans did not intend to retreat any further. His headquarters issued an order to hold the ground gained and dig in. Shallow rifle pits, dug hastily under fire, turned over the following days into ever deeper lines of trenches. Although fighting continued on the Aisne until the end of September, neither the Allies nor the Germans could move the front any longer. British losses in the fighting on the Aisne amounted, according to British figures, to some 13,500 killed, wounded and missing.

Since the frontal attack had failed, both sides tried to outflank the enemy to the west, where the front line was still open. From around 17 September the French and Germans moved corps after corps north, fighting in Picardy, at Albert and at Arras. This Race to the Sea ended in October on the North Sea coast in Flanders. At the beginning of October the British Expeditionary Force left its positions on the Aisne and moved north, closer to its ports. The line of trenches that came into being in the autumn of 1914 from Switzerland to the North Sea survived in its general outline until 1918.