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For the next four years, both sides essentially remained in position neither machine guns nor heavy artillery, neither poison gas nor armored vehicles could provide the breakthroughs everyone expected. Both sides dug in, and trenches soon stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. When the French held in the Battle of the Marne, however, the war quickly deteriorated into a stalemate.

German armies drove rapidly toward Paris, quickly reducing the Belgian fortifications in an attempt to outflank the defenders through sheer pacing. The German Schlieffen Plan, like the plans of the other Great Powers, was predicated upon these principles and thus the opening weeks of the war looked as if all expectations would be met. When the First World War began, therefore, nearly everyone expected a war of movement, one dominated by rapid concentrations, stunning offensive breakthroughs, and sweeping envelopments. The Russian General Staff, who studied their defeat at the hands of the Japanese intensely, declared in 1910 that given developments in military technology, no future war could last more than a year. Students of the Second Boer War (1900-1902) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) reached similar conclusions. The most frequently cited example was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, where the Prussians’ ability to move troops rapidly to concentration points and bring heavy artillery to bear resulted in a French defeat within, essentially, six weeks. New technologies like the machine gun and advances in heavy artillery, they reasoned, gave the attackers such firepower that static defenses could not hold out long. Most military leaders and politicians, along with the general public, assumed that any conflict would be short. In August 1914 European military thinkers still worshipped in the cult of the offensive.