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While France held most of the front line against the Germans, the British Expeditionary Force had moved to the end of the front closest to the English Channel. From late October through most of November, they and nearby French and Belgian troops were battered by repeated German attacks around the ancient Belgian weaving center of Ypres. Heavily reinforced with new men from England, the British held a bulge in the front line that included the town itself, a picturesque assemblage of Gothic arches, medieval ramparts, a spired cathedral, and the landmark Cloth Hall with a clock tower—almost all of which would soon be shattered into rubble by German artillery fire.

In their introduction to trench warfare, the British made all kinds of mistakes: they did not have enough spades, for instance, and sometimes had to dig with pitchforks taken from Belgian barns. But the German attackers proved even more maladroit. Masses of them advanced head-on into British rifle and machine-gun fire, young officer cadets walking to their deaths with flowers in their helmets, singing patriotic songs. Astonished British soldiers looking through their binoculars saw German troops advancing with arms linked, wearing caps with what appeared to be the badges distinct to university students. Nor did Germans with regulation helmets seem to realize that the little spikes on top only made the wearers better targets. (These would not be removed until 1916.) "When immediately in front of the enemy," ran the German army's infantry regulations, "the men should charge with bayonet and, with a cheer, penetrate the position." The regulations spelled out what drum rolls should accompany the assault, but not what to do when British machine guns started firing.

Although they greatly outnumbered the British, sometimes by as much as seven to one, the attackers made little headway as British fire slashed huge holes in their lines, leaving thousands of Germans dead. There should have been a clear lesson here about how strongly this strange new style of battle favored defenders, but it was a lesson that, in different ways, each side resisted learning. No general was ready to acknowledge that the machine gun had upended warfare as it had been known for centuries. A single such gun emplacement could stave off hundreds, even thousands of attackers. "I saw trees as large round as a man's thigh literally cut down by the stream of lead from these weapons," wrote an American journalist in Belgium.

Nor was anyone prepared for what the best defensive weapons turned out to be. In times past, defenses had offered their own kind of glory: great turreted stone fortresses that took years to construct. Now, however, almost anything above ground could be smashed by heavy artillery in days or even hours, as the Germans had done to Belgium's forts. Could it really be that the best defensive position was below ground, in nothing more, in the end, than a deep, narrow slit in the earth? And that the most impenetrable fortification was something as mundane as cattle fencing?

It was an Illinois farmer and former county sheriff, Joseph F. Glidden, not a military engineer, who had used some of his wife's hairpins to construct the prototype of a new kind of fence he patented in 1874. Forty years later, unrolled at night in great coils and staked firmly to the ground, barbed wire turned out to be the barrier of all barriers. Cutting through it was hard enough for attackers under the best of circumstances, and almost impossible when bullets were flying. Paradoxically, the same tangle of wires, being porous, easily absorbed the blast of exploding shells, which made it remarkably difficult to destroy.

German barbed wire in particular would prove a nearly insuperable obstacle, spread out for miles in a dense maze 50 to 100 feet wide and anchored to long rows of six-foot-high wooden posts pounded into the ground. For both sides, as they dug in, trenches and wire only grew more