War begins: world war one

War begins: world war one

Advances in military technology meant that defensive firepower out-weighed offensive capabilities, making the war particularly murderous, as tactics had failed to keep up. Barbed wire was a significant hindrance to massed infantry advances; artillery, now vastly more lethal than in the 1870s, coupled with machine guns, made crossing open ground a nightmarish prospect. By 1915 both sides were using poison gas. Neither side ever won a battle with gas, but it made life even more miserable in the trenches and became one of the most feared, and longest remembered, horrors of the war.

After the First Battle of the Marne, both Entente and German forces began a series of outflanking manoeuvres to try to force the other to retreat, in the so-called Race to the Sea. Britain and France soon found themselves facing entrenched German positions from Lorraine to Belgium's Flemish coast. Britain and France sought to take the offensive, while Germany defended occupied territories. One consequence was that German trenches were much better constructed than those of their enemy: Anglo-French trenches were only intended to be 'temporary' before their forces broke through German defences. Some hoped to break the stalemate by utilizing science and technology. In April 1915, the Germans used chlorine gas for the first time, opening a four mile wide hole in the Allied lines when French colonial troops retreated before it. This breach was closed by Canadian soldiers at both the Second Battle of Ypres and Third Battle of Ypres, (where over 5000 Canadian soldiers were gassed to death), earning German respect.

Neither side proved able to deliver a decisive blow for the next four years, though protracted German action at Verdun throughout 1916, and the Entente's failure at the Somme, in the summer of 1916, brought the exhausted French army to the brink of collapse. Futile attempts at more frontal assaults, at terrible cost to the French poilu (infantry), led to mutinies which threatened the integrity of the front line, after the Nivelle Offensive in spring of 1917. News of the Russian Revolution gave a new incentive to socialist sentiments among the troops. Red flags were hoisted and the Internationale was sung on several occasions. At the height of the mutiny, 30,000 to 40,000 French soldiers participated.