Adopting a strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan, the German army invaded Belgium on August 3, 1914, and advanced into France, overwhelming retreating Allied troops until they were within 30 miles of Paris. At that point, near the Marne River, the Allies counterattacked, halting the advance. Had the Germans continued their advance, they almost certainly would have captured Paris, but fearing that their supply lines were overextended, they chose to dig in along a front that formed an arc, eventually stretching from the coast of the English Channel in Flanders to Verdun, near the Swiss border.

It was this site--the western front--that was to be the scene of trench warfare over the next four years, a stalemate in which little ground would be won and many lives would be lost. The front was, in historian Eric Hobsbawm's words, "a machine for massacre such as probably had never before been seen in the history of warfare." The long drudgery of the war, periodically interrupted by major offensives launched at the Somme, Passchendaele, Loos, and Verdun, left the rank and file of both sides demoralized, war-weary, and profoundly suspicious of the authorities, military and political, that were responsible for the bloodletting.

In 1918, having defeated the Russians on the Eastern Front, the Germans risked one more throw of the dice with a massive offensive in what came to be called the second battle of the Somme. They might have succeeded but for the presence of the newest ally, the Americans, who brought overwhelming numbers of fresh troops and arms to the Allied side. The Allies launched their final offensive in the Meuse-Argonne area of the front in the fall of 1918. The offensive was a success, but not enough to end the war. The armistice on November 11, 1918, resulted not directly from the military situation, but from the collapse of the German government on the home front, triggered by the starvation and despair of the mass of German people.

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