Trench warfare

After the Battle of the Marne and the Race to the Sea in the autumn of 1914, an unbroken front some 700 kilometres long ran in the west from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Machine guns, quick-firing artillery and barbed-wire entanglements gave the defender such an advantage that infantry attacks ended in huge losses for gains measured in hundreds of metres. The war was fought in much the same way on the Isonzo, at Gallipoli and at Salonika.

On the Eastern Front, with its vast distances and thinner lines, movement returned more often, but there too the front froze in trenches for long periods: on the Nida, the Rawka and the Bzura in the winter of 1914–15, and in Volhynia and eastern Galicia in 1915–1917. In the west the deadlock was broken only in 1918, by new methods: short, carefully planned bombardments, storm-troop tactics, tanks and close co-operation between all arms.