The Western Front

Germany's Schlieffen Plan called for a rapid knockout blow against France by sweeping through neutral Belgium. The plan failed at the Battle of the Marne (September 1914), and the war on the Western Front settled into four years of trench warfare. Hundreds of miles of trenches stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. Battles like Verdun (1916, perhaps 700,000 casualties) and the Somme (1916, over a million casualties) achieved almost no movement of the front line.