War on the Western Front
During the Battle of the Marne, which lasted from 5th to 12th September 1914, the German army was halted. From that moment, a quick win on the Western Front was impossible. The two sides became unable to move forward and they dug themselves in. It became a stalemate, with Belgium and Northern France turning into a war zone. In Western Europe, the armies of both sides were of equal strength and because of this, the war became a trench war. The generals ordered their soldiers to dig in along the front. This means that they dug trenches, narrow ditches and tunnels into the ground, to hide from the bullets and artillery of the enemy.
These trenches were heavily defended with bunkers, machineguns, barbed wire and landmines, thus making them almost impossible to overcome by force. Still the generals tried to do this for years, at the cost of millions of lives. The land between the trenches became a no-man’s-land. Because of all the bombing, the forests, creeks and hills of Belgium and Northern France became a muddy, barren land full of craters and holes.