In August 1914, the Germans implemented their Schlieffen Plan, an attempt to knock France out of contention before turning Germany's attention to the slower-mobilising Russians. This plan, likened to a swinging door hinged on the Franco-German border areas, swept through Belgium and Northern France. As the map shows, this plan envisaged a wide sweep through northern France, aiming at seizing Paris. This plan did not work. Although initially successful, French and British forces blunted the German attack, and then forced them onto the defensive. By the end of 1914, the huge effort had exhausted both sides. The Schlieffen Plan had failed, and Germany was now committed to fighting a two-front war with France and Britain in the west and Russia in the East. Consequently, German forces dug in for the winter where they had halted and invited the French and British to eject them from the areas in France and Belgium that they had captured. The British and French, meanwhile, lacked the resources to mount large scale offensives, so they dug in and prepared for offensives in 1915. Gradually a 400 mile line of static trench defences snaked its way from the North Sea, across Belgium and northern France to the Swiss border. Thus began a bloody siege warfare that was to cost millions of lives before the Germans were finally forced to surrender in November 1918.
| The Nature of Trench Warfare | Routine Life in the Trenches | Patrols and Raiding from the Trenches | Assaulting a Trench Line | Defeating a Trench Line |