Contrary to popular understanding, “trench warfare” was not new to the world in 1914. Entrenchment had always played a role in war, especially sieges, and the advent of industrial era technologies in the middle of the 19th Century created scenes of mass slaughter and static futility well before the First World War. Importantly, these scenes took place all over the globe, leaving no doubt that this emerging way of war was a universal product of the industrial revolution and the new military technologies it produced. Accurate, repeating small arms and rapid-firing, high explosive artillery allowed a determined defender to hold a line of battle against a more numerous attacker, while mass production and new transportation modes made it theoretically possible for combatants to fight continuously over an expanding battlefront as long as national resources allowed — a phenomenon that military historians call “total war.” Mass conscription, mass production, mass organization, and mass communication
allowed states to weaponize their burgeoning populations. Though they still featured unit tactics appropriate to the battlefields of Napoleon Bonaparte, battles during this era began to resemble siege warfare as if by default.

After 1863, the American motif of armed conflict was Robert E. Lee’s folly at Gettysburg, when he ordered nine Confederate brigades to advance into the teeth of prepared Union defenses following the longest preparatory artillery bombardment of the entire Civil War. All that spent ammunition was wasted, however, for it was not explosive enough to do serious damage to the Union ranks. With his army shattered by the withering defensive fire, including new repeating rifles, Lee was forced to retreat to Virginia. He would never threaten the northern states again. For historians, the more informative battle took place a year later, when Ulysses S. Grant dug in at
Petersburg to begin a nine-month duel of nerve and numbers with Lee. Unable to break through with bloody frontal assaults and underground mines, Grant nevertheless refused to retreat, but rather extended his lines, knowing that Lee had not recovered the strength lost at Gettysburg and could not extend his own line of battle forever. Even though the Army of Virginia often inflicted unequal casualties
in these engagements, the Confederacy proved unequal to the logistical pressures of a continuous struggle and lost the war.

Much like the laws of physics, the new principles of fire seen in the American Civil War were the same everywhere, so other battles soon unfolded in a similar way, with similar results. A year after Gettysburg, as Grant tested Gatling guns against Lee’s army in the trenches of northern Virginia, the Emperor of China bestowed the equivalent of field marshal rank on a British officer named Charles Gordon as reward for winning his long and bloody war with the Taiping rebels. Gordon had helped raise a modern force: the Ever Victorious Army wore regular uniforms, wielded percussion
muzzle-loading rifles and cannons from American, British, and German suppliers in Shanghai, and used the waterways to supply themselves with enough ammunition to sustain massed fire tactics in battle.

Whereas the Taiping war had begun with weapons and armies fit for a medieval battlefield, and continued as cities burned for over a decade, killing between 20 and 40 million Chinese, Gordon had finished the conflict in less than a year leading an army that was trained and equipped to fight the Battle of Gettysburg.

One year after the American Civil War ended, the combined armies of Brazil and Argentina advanced into prepared fields of fire at Curupayty. Thousands of Brazilians and Argentines died while only a few hundred defending Paraguayans were killed.
The army of Paraguay had muskets, rifles, some small field pieces, and a few very old cannons. Whereas President Francisco Solano López was landlocked and cut off from the world, however, Brazil could purchase American Spencer carbines and French la Hitte rifles and British 20 lb. Whitworth guns. Given the chance to return the favor with more modern arms, Argentina and her allies shot the attacking Paraguayans to pieces at Tuyutí less than a year later in almost the same format. A devotee of European military traditions and training who thought of himself as a South American
Napoleon, López fought to the bitter end three years later, but his fate was sealed. In the native Guaraní tongue, the bloody debacle of his reign is called the Guerra Guazú — the Great War.

Six years after the Battle of Curupayty, the French Army tried out new weapons and tactics against the King of Prussia. They called their new doctrine “battalion fire” (feu de bataillon). Rather than rotating ranks of men shooting unaimed volleys of musket ball at the enemy, the new training had each man sustaining a high rate of aimed fire on his own. Their weapons were far more accurate than anything seen before, shooting bullets engineered for better, faster killing. However, at Sedan and Metz the new armaments proved inadequate to stop the Prussian Army like France had hoped. The Chassepot rifle was newer and better than its rival, the Dreyse ‘needle gun,’ but
le mitrailleuse — a primitive machine gun resembling a giant pepperbox — was terribly awkward, with a long reloading time that left French gunners vulnerable while German infantry advanced on their positions. Krupp’s cannons were also superior to the artillery that most French units were still fielding, especially when targeted against troops in the open. After Napoleon III became a prisoner at Sedan,
Paris fought on by digging trenches, capitulating only when relief and resupply became impossible — a defeat that resonates with the debacles that Robert E. Lee and Francisco López inflicted on their own armies.

In a classic case of overcompensation, the defeat of 1871 stung proud France so badly that her armée went to war in 1914 with a doctrine called attaque à outrance (literally “attack to excess”), marching headlong into a cauldron of steel and explosives spat out by far more advanced armaments, producing 75,000 French casualties in the first three days of combat along the Belgian border. Collectively known as the Battle of the Frontiers, these clashes at Bertrix and Charleroi and the Ardennes would prove the
most lethal of the entire conflict, and largely because there were no trenches from which to fight in relative safety. Two months later, the survivors of those early battles were living and fighting in trenches along a 430-mile battlefront consisting of “no man’s land” between opposing lines, the format by which we still remember Le Grande Guerre (“the Great War”). In the parlance of military theorists, the movement to contact phase of meeting engagements had been followed by planned, set-piece battles of offense and defense.

But we can also say that, having “kicked off” their war and run all the way from one “sideline” (the Swiss border) to the opposite sideline (the English Channel), the combatants began to wrestle along parallel lines of “scrimmage” with a “neutral zone” in between, measuring success in yards gained. In fact, this butcher’s bill, incurred as the two sides fought over tiny pieces of northern France, is how westerners understand the entire war a century later. Yet the situation that developed in 1914 was not unforeseen.

Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the German strategist whose meticulous planning would shape his country’s opening moves of the First World War, clearly envisioned this scenario when he explained the need for the fastest possible rate of advance. If the German Army could not defeat France immediately, he even advised a strategy of entrenchment, though he still hoped it would proceed quickly.

In that event, “[all along the line, the army] will try, as in siege warfare, to come to grips with the enemy from position to position, day and night, advancing, digging in, advancing again, etc., using every means of modern science to shake the enemy’s confidence behind his lines,” von Schlieffen wrote in his Great Memorandum of 1905. “The attack must never be permitted to come to a standstill, as in the East Asian
war.” Here, the Generalfeldmarschall was referring to yet another armed conflict, in yet another corner of the world, that had demonstrated the new principles of fire.

Defending fields of electrified barbed wire with state-of-the-art weapons, in 1904 a Russian army held out in fieldworks, inflicting severe losses on the Imperial Japanese Army. But Field Marshal Ōyama Iwao attacked over and over again with suicidal abandon, causing Gen. Aleksei Kurupatkin to lose his nerve. Japan had built a modern army with weapons supplied by Krupp and other European sources. Seeing the upstart empire win the Battles of Liaoyang and Mukden, Western observers took the lesson
that modern field defenses could be overwhelmed if only one threw enough cannon shells — and cannon-fodder — at the enemy.

It is easy to see why this belief kept being confirmed. At Khartoum in 1884, Gov. Gen. Charles Gordon — the former leader of the Ever Victorious Army — ordered the construction of a huge defensive zone complete with firing trenches, landmines, and barbed wire. Gordon held out for nearly a year this way, but he eventually died along with nearly his entire force when an army of Mahdist militants crossed the Nile at its low ebb, outflanking and overwhelming those state-of-the-art fieldworks. According to the military theorists of the age, this result proved that fanaticism could overcome material limits.

Never mind the machine guns. Never mind the barbed wire. What mattered most was willpower. Manly disregard for life and limb — what the French called élan — would make victory possible no matter what obstacles were thrown in the way. It was very like the spirit which animates every football underdog: work hard enough, want it hard enough, catch a break, and you may overcome the longest odds.

As a whole, European generals tended to look down on these “colonial” wars, yet they offered important lessons to the continentals who heeded them. In December of 1899, Boers of the Orange Free State stopped a British army cold at Magersfontein; they fought from trenches, behind barbed wire fences, with modern rifles and rapid-firing artillery. It was Field Marshal Sir John French, a veteran of this Second Boer War, who recognized the looming stalemate in 1914 and gave the fateful order for his army to start digging fieldworks.

“Throughout the whole course of [September and October] our troops have suffered very heavily from [siege artillery] fire,” he wrote, “although its effect latterly was largely mitigated by more efficient and thorough entrenching, the necessity for which I impressed strongly upon Army Corps Commanders.” The British Army’s entrenching tools, which had previously been withheld to encourage the aforementioned “offensive spirit,” were belatedly delivered to the front lines. These were not enough to do the needed digging, so “all villages within the area of our occupation were searched for heavy entrenching tools, a large number of which were collected.” Strands of barbed wire proliferated immediately, becoming thickets by Spring. So did the machine guns which swept these obstacles with automatic fire. Developed over decades, refined and improved throughout the war years, these techniques allowed both sides to defend long stretches of the Western Front with relatively few troops. Hoping then to break through the enemy’s line and restore mobility to the war, each side assembled artillery parks to launch mountains of high explosive shells at one another in hopes of clearing a path through the other side’s defenses.

Supersonic blast trauma was not totally new to warfare — Alfred Nobel had patented trinitrotoluene, or TNT, in 1867 — but this was the first time that any two armies had flung so much of the stuff at each other so much of the time. More than any other weapon, it was these rapid-firing guns and high explosive shells which caused men to seek safety by digging trenches in the first place.

Shelling became a daily fact of life in the trenches even as they were dug. A typical British II Corps battalion war diary from October 1914 reports heavy shellfire all day on the 18th; the next day’s entry says only “Good deal of shelling all day, some casualties.” On the 20th: “Very heavily shelled all day.”

Then the unit relocated under cover of night, and just in time, for on the 21st “The village of Herlies was smashed to pieces by heavy shells.” After withdrawing another half-mile north towards Aubers, the diary entry for the 22nd reads: “In trenches under moderate shellfire. No casualties.” But there were casualties. An epidemic of concussion injuries had broken out in the ranks like brain-devouring field lice. These wounds were not counted in daily reports because they were invisible, yet their effects were immediately apparent.

Next week: a 21st Century discovery that explains the symptoms of 19th Century destruction