Failure of the Schlieffen Plan.

In just over a month of fighting, two deeply disturbing features of the war were evident even to the generals who had unleashed the first campaigns: a quick victory was impossible, and the human and material losses incurred as a result of the industrialization of war preparation were on a scale never before seen. The Schlieffen plan had at first seemed to go according to schedule. Although the Belgians had declared war rather than allow the Germans passage across their borders, their great fortresses had not proved a big obstacle. The right wing had swung along the Channel coast to enter France on August 27, and at one time were within forty miles of Paris. But the British had supplied an unexpectedly large expeditionary force, which helped strengthen the French center; the Russians penetrated into East Prussia and thus compelled the Germans to detach part of their forces from the western to the eastern front; and the poor leadership of Von Moltke had allowed his two armies on the Belgian front to lose contact. The French commander Joffre seized his opportunity to counterattack, and threw in his reserve against the dangerously extended German line to the east of Paris. In the first Battle of the Marne, the Germans were forced to retreat to the line of the river Aisne, where they were able to establish a strong defense line. By November, when the winter rains began and operations literally bogged down, the war of rapid movement originally planned by the generals had turned into a slogging match between entrenched armies, disposed in double lines of ditches behind barbed wire barriers along a front that stretched all the way from the Channel coast to Switzerland. These lines were to move only a few miles for the next four years.This stalemate was the result of enormous losses on both sides. The British lost half of their professional soldiers in the defense of one city, Ypres. In only four days of fighting in the Battle of the Frontiers, the French army had suffered 140,000 casualties; in the first sixteen months, over 600,000 of their soldiers had been killed. German losses were on a similar scale, as army commanders threw in troops in senseless bayonet charges. At the fort of Liége, a Belgian officer related, the Germans "made no attempt at deploying but came on line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped on top of each other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded that threatened to mask our guns." By the end of the Battle of the Marne, German casualties were 650,000. It was, however, in the trenches that the full horror of the war became evident. The lines became steadily more elaborate, stretching miles back to the rear with communication trenches, dugouts, command posts, fortified bastions, machine-gun nests, and camouflaged artillery. Normal military activity consisted of exchange of rifle fire or throwing of grenades, accompanied by planned artillery barrages. But at frequent intervals the army commanders mounted massive assaults intended to drive back the enemy over a long salient, or less frequently, to establish a breakthrough in his line that would enable him to be attacked from the rear. Such attacks began with a long artillery barrage intended to blow away the enemy's barbed wire, flatten his front trenches, and destroy his morale. Then, at first light of dawn, the attacking army, usually carrying heavy packs and fixed bayonets, would go "over the top" in long lines that walked slowly, in rapidly diminishing numbers, toward the enemy's trenches. Occasionally, poison gas would be hurled ahead of them, but it would often blow back into their own faces. No more vicious or militarily ineffective method of slaughter could have been imagined. Throughout 1915, the French mounted a "war of attrition," a series of attacks at different points of the German line that achieved nothing except punishing losses for both sides. In 1916, the Germans attempted to break the French line by capturing the pivotal fortress of Verdun; although they failed to capture it, they lost 336,000 men in the attempt. To the suffering of the fighting, the weather added a new element. As the bombardments destroyed the foliage and even the topsoil along the four-hundred-mile front, the rains turned the land surface into a kind of moonscape of muddy pools, from which bodies protruded and in which men drowned. Disease was spread among the troops by rats and polluted food and drink. "We are not in fact leading the life of men at all," wrote one young soldier, "but that of animals living in holes in the ground and only showing our heads outside to fight and to feed."

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The 1st Battle of Marne. On the the Germans continued their push towards Paris. This was part of the Schlieffen Plan. It was expected that the German army would take Paris. And so the British and French troops retreated to positions south of the Seine and Marne rivers. Many Parisians left their homes, expecting defeat. On September 6th the French 6th Army launched a counter attack. The Germans maneuvered the First army to meet the advance, leaving a gap of 50 km between their First and second armies. British and French troops pushed into the gap and held off German counter attacks. Despite being at the brink of defeat for much of This battle, the French had managed to safe Paris. (Reinforcements were sent in taxi's from Paris. During This battle, such was the need for extra men on the front lines). The Germans, unable to make the final break through, retreated back to the River Aisne.

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The first battle of the Aisne. Hoping to take advantage of the German retreat to the Aisne the Allies launched a series of offensives against German positions their on 13th September. The Germans however had dug in, creating a range of strong defenses. By the end of September it was realised that frontal attacks on the German defenses would lead to very high casualty figures and the assault drew to a close. Over 250,000 French soldiers perished trying to overcome the German forces, a similar number of German soldiers are thought to have been killed in This early battle. A stalemate had been reached and the French and British now had to consolidate their positions and dig in themselves. Thus began the horrors of Trench Warfare.

The First Battle of the Marne marked the end of the German sweep into France and the beginning of the trench warfare that was to characterise World War One.

Germany's grand Schlieffen Plan to conquer France entailed a wheeling movement of the northern wing of its armies through central Belgium to enter France near Lille. It would turn west near the English Channel and then south to cut off the French retreat. If the plan succeeded, Germany's armies would simultaneously encircle the French Army from the north and capture Paris.

A French offensive in Lorraine prompted German counter-attacks that threw the French back onto a fortified barrier. Their defence strengthened, they could send troops to reinforce their left flank - a redistribution of strength that would prove vital in the Battle of the Marne. The German northern wing was weakened further by the removal of 11 divisions to fight in Belgium and East Prussia. The German 1st Army, under Kluck, then swung north of Paris, rather than south west, as intended. This required them to pass into the valley of the River Marne across the Paris defences, exposing them to a flank attack and a possible counter-envelopment.

On 3 September, General Joffre, the French commander, ordered a halt to the French retreat and three days later his reinforced left flank began a general offensive. Kluck was forced to halt his advance prematurely in order to support his flank: he was still no further up the Marne Valley than Meaux.

On 9 September Bülow learned that the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was advancing into the gap between his 2nd Army and Kluck. He ordered a retreat, obliging Kluck to do the same. The counterattack of the French 5th and 6th Armies and the BEF developed into the First Battle of the Marne, a general counter-attack by the French Army. By 11 September the Germans were in full retreat.

This remarkable change in fortunes was caused partially by the exhaustion of many of the German forces: some had marched more than 240km (150 miles), fighting frequently. The German advance was also hampered by demolished bridges and railways, constricting their supply lines, and they had underestimated the resilience of the French.

The Germans withdrew northward from the Marne and made a firm defensive stand along the Lower Aisne River. Here the benefits of defence over attack became clear as the Germans repelled successive Allied attacks from the shelter of trenches: the First Battle of the Aisne marked the real beginning of trench warfare on the Western Front.

In saving Paris from capture by pushing the Germans back some 72km (45 miles), the First Battle of the Marne was a great strategic victory, as it enabled the French to continue the war. However, the Germans succeeded in capturing a large part of the industrial north east of France, a serious blow. Furthermore, the rest of 1914 bred the geographic and tactical deadlock that would take another three years and countless lives to break.

Militarily the war in the west began on August 4, 1914, when German troops from seven Armies swept into Luxembourg and Belgium as part of the "Schleiffen plan," which required a sweeping move through neutral Belgium and down to Paris from the North. Fortunately for the Allies, the plan did not work as expected, due both to its own limitations and German High Command's weakening of the crucial right attack wing. The result was a partial German success which failed in its ultimate goal of knocking the French army out of the war early. The German Armies swept into Belgium as planned, but the Belgian Army did not oblige by quickly losing. They instead put up a stiff fight, which delayed the rigid German campaign schedule. After overcoming the Belgians, the northern German armies marched into northern France, where they were again stiffly rebuffed in several places, both by the newly arrived British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the French Third and Fourth Armies in the Ardennes region. The Fifth Army under French General Lanrezac, was caught outnumbered and nearly outflanked, thanks to French high command's refusal to acknowledge a German thrust from the north. Only at the last moment did Lanrezac receive permission to reposition part of his army to face the oncoming juggernaut. His freshly repositioned troops were hit with the full force of the German Second Army, and sent reeling back to the south. Soon after, as the BEF also withdrew south after their own travails, the entire front broke open as troops on both sides raced southward to the Marne, and the prize: Paris.

The German offensive was only blunted when German General Alexander von Kluck re-faced his First Army in order to turn the flank of the now exhausted French Fifth Army. French General Joseph Gallieni quickly assembled the newly formed Sixth Army and, coordinating with Fifth Army's commander, assaulted Kluck's exposed flank. In the process of defending himself, Kluck redirected his corps westward, allowing yet another dangerous gap to open between him and Bulow. These errors (which were sanctioned by General Headquarters) cost the Germans any further progress and they withdrew back to safe positions north of the Marne River, where they resisted attempts by the French to dislodge them. The fault lay not only with Kluck, but with the German Commander-in-Chief, Count Helmut von Molkte and probably with the Schleiffen plan itself, which failed to account for the limitations of infantry formations operating at such rapid tempos.

After the in September, 1914, the Germans were forced to retreat to the River Aisne. The German commander, General , decided that his troops must at all costs hold onto those parts of France and Belgium that Germany still occupied. Falkenhayn ordered his men to dig trenches that would provide them with protection from the advancing French and British troops. The soon realised that they could not break through this line and they also began to dig trenches.

After a few months these trenches had spread from the North Sea to the Swiss Frontier. As the Germans were the first to decide where to stand fast and dig, they had been able to choose the best places to build their trenches. The possession of the higher ground not only gave the Germans a tactical advantage, but it forced the British and French to live in the worst conditions. Most of this area was rarely a few feet above sea level. As soon as soldiers began to dig down they would invariably find water two or three feet below the surface. trenches were a constant problem for soldiers on the .

were usually about seven feet deep and six feet wide. The front of the trench was known as the . The top two or three feet of the parapet and the (the rear side of the trench) would consist of a thick line of to absorb any bullets or shell fragments.

In a trench of this depth it was impossible to see over the top, so a two or three-foot ledge known as a , was added. Trenches were not dug in straight lines. Otherwise, if the enemy had a successive offensive, and got into your trenches, they could shoot straight along the line. Each trench was dug with alternate and .

were also placed at the bottom of the trenches to protect soldiers from problems such as . Soldiers also made and in the side of the trenches to give them some protection from the weather and enemy fire.

The were also protected by and . Short trenches called saps were dug from the front-trench into . The sap-head, usually about 30 yards forward of the front-line, were then used as .

Behind the were support and reserve trenches. The three rows of trenches covered between 200 and 500 yards of ground. , were dug at an angle to the frontline trench and was used to transport men, equipment and food supplies.

Failure of the Schlieffen Plan.

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