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By Root 1082 0

according to the orderly plans of either side. The battlefield was still one of movement, as huge armies tried to wheel and outflank each other, sometimes marching a dozen or more miles a day with thousands of supply wagons rumbling along behind and sending up choking clouds of dust. Short of military vehicles, the British mobilized everything at hand, from moving vans to beer trucks, and these, with their original signs promising less deadly contents, carried ammunition to the troops. There was still a role for the British cavalry: not the thousands-strong charges of the pre-machine-gun age, but occasional small skirmishes and, especially during bad weather that grounded spotter planes, reconnaissance forays to probe French lanes, fields, and forests, trying to find where the Germans were.

Sometimes the Germans themselves did not quite know where they were. Wars abound in chaos, but in the early stages of this one the confusion was of a new order of magnitude as millions of soldiers streamed along narrow country roads in the late-summer heat. In their wake came an array of problems that no commander had expected. This may have been the first industrialized war, but the industrialization was erratic and undependable. As the German army moved ever farther from its railway lines—an infantry division required some two dozen freight cars of supplies per day—other forms of transport became crucial. But automotive engines were in their infancy, and during the army's push into France, 60 percent of its trucks broke down. This left preindustrial horses to do the work. But they, too, required fuel: some two million pounds of feed a day, far more than the countryside could furnish. Eating unripe green corn from French fields, German horses sickened and began dying by the tens of thousands. And when horses pulling supply wagons gave out, soldiers started running low on food—and on artillery ammunition; it evidently had not occurred to planners on either side that the new quick-firing howitzers would use up shells so rapidly. In the end, the very size of the German juggernaut proved a liability: a full-strength German army corps on the move, for example, could stretch out over 18 miles of road, which meant that when the head of the column finished its day's march, the rear had barely begun. The longer the fighting continued, the less it resembled the tidy, forward-thrusting arrows that rival general staffs had long been used to inscribing on maps. The armies began to bog down.

By late October, neither side could make much headway against the other, so each began digging protective trenches. The war of maneuver was over—just temporarily, the generals thought—and the front line began to solidify. Two parallel rows of trenches faced each other on a wriggling, northwest-to-southeast diagonal beginning at the English Channel, then crossing a corner of Belgium, northern France, and finally a tiny sliver of its onetime province of Alsace (all France had been able to capture from Germany), some 475 miles in all, ending at the Swiss frontier.

Trench warfare was not new. The American Civil War had ended with a version of it, at the besieged Confederate capital, Richmond, and at nearby Petersburg, and more recently British troops had sometimes dug in to protect themselves against Boer fire. But it seemed such an ignoble sort of combat that hardly anyone in Europe planned for it, certainly not Sir John French, who concluded, almost incredulously, in a report to the King, that "the spade will be as great a necessity as the rifle." Nonetheless, his cavalryman's optimism remained undaunted. "In my opinion," he insisted to Kitchener in October, "the enemy are vigorously playing their last card, and I am confident they will fail."

As his men wielded their spades, French began dreaming of cavalry attacks that would make combat glorious once again. He proposed an aggressive thrust at the Germans, unfazed by the fact that his troops would have to cross a large swamp in the process, but his subordinate commanders and staff officers talked him out of