North Sea HOLLAND n Intwerp Nieuwpoort THE UNITED KINGDOM BELGIUM BRUSSELS a Calais Ypres Armentières ille iege Rhine River Arras Vimy Cambrai n Mons English Channel euge River Meuse Yep Albert Le Cateau Quentin Amiens LUXEMBOURG GERMANY Soissons Compiegne Aisne R Ver Reims Chateau ois Chantilly Thierry Seine Ri Verdun ver Metz larne River Saint Mihiel PARIS FRANCE Nancy Sait Meurthe River pinal WESTERN FRONT BATTLEFIELDS 1914 1918 CITIES Moselle River Mulhouse Belfort Pfetterhouse L CAPITAL CITIES RIVERS SWITZERLAND The western front
along the western front from the English Channel to the Swiss border Once their positions were in place the lines moved little at most ten miles 16 km in either direction over the next three and a half years BREAKING THE DEADLOCK Breaking the deadlock required innovation The Germans and the French and British had arranged secure defenses for themselves Their trench systems grew elaborate and wide They arranged barbed wire in no man's land to hold back BATTLEFIELD BRAVERY attacking soldiers They built fortifications When the Great War began the French army for their weapons which protected their trusted that its troops could overcome any gunmen as they fired on the enemy These obstacle using spirit and bravery The troops quickly learned however that battlefield bravery defenses were particular to trench warfare did not matter when they were faced with And they were difficult to beat with the automatic weapons Future French president Charles de Gaulle experienced this firsthand weapons of the past Both sides would have during the war As he described it to work to create new weapons and refine with affected calm the officers let old ones to suit the needs of the trenches themselves be killed standing upright some obstinate platoons stuck their bayonets in British colonel Ernest Dunlop their rifles bugles sounded the charge Swinton saw the unique problem trenches but all to no purpose In an instant it had become clear that not all the courage in the presented He recognized that the British world could withstand this fire needed a weapon designed specifically
to beat the So defenses in trenches he suggested creating some moving bulletproof device which could not only climb forward and forge its way through uncut wire but could knock out machine guns in a straight fight W8 The vehicle he described would eventually become the tank Other weapons too were invented or improved out of necessity Weapons that had been popularly employed in the 1700s were reimagined to suit the needs of the trenches This resulted in modern grenades and trench mortars Airplanes were originally used for aerial observation and eventually were armed with machine guns Zeppelins or airships were invented in 1900 During the war Both sides including these French soldiers were forced to dig in and live in a maze of
CONDITIONS IN THE ALLIED TRENCHES Life in the Allied trenches was far from military alone treated 20 000 soldiers for pleasant for soldiers Standing water filled trench foot during the winter of 1914 1915 the bottoms of the muddy trenches and The trenches were also home to the temperatures were cold As one British soldier bodies of dead soldiers and the stench of remembered When you take your boots off their decaying bodies filled the trenches One your feet are like a washerwoman's hands all British soldier described how soldiers bones wrinkled cold and everything was shrunken poked through the trench walls and skulls terrible 12 Day after day of standing in these appeared like mushrooms He described conditions resulted in painful swelling of the that in he too the trenches once found feet or trench foot Some cases were so a pair of boots still containing someone's extreme that soldiers suffered gangrene or feet 12 needed to have a foot amputated The British Germany used them to drop bombs on cities Both the Germans and the Allies experimented with the use of poisonous gas to attack unsuspecting opponents And in 1915 the Germans introduced the flamethrower a new weapon capable of spraying liquid fire up to 20 yards 18 m Technological advances completely altered the way World War I was conducted Necessity demanded both sides develop new weapons to prevent mass slaughter Historian Libby O Connell said of the advancements during World War I Soldiers rode in on horses and they left in airplanes 13
