War in the Trenches
This lecture describes World War I as a war of defense following the failure of Germany's offensive strategy, detailing the brutal realities of trench warfare. It examines the impact of new artillery, the resulting bloody stalemates, and the French mutinies driven by sheer horror.
European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202)
With the failure of Germany's offensive strategy, WWI became a war of defense, in which trenches played a major role. The use of trenches and barbed wire, coupled with the deployment of new, more deadly forms of artillery, created extremely bloody stalemate situations. The hopelessness of this arrangement resulted in a number of mutinies on the French side, motivated neither by defeatism nor by ideology, but rather by the sheer horror of trench warfare. Due to the unprecedented scale of casualties, WWI impressed itself irresistibly upon the cultural imagination of the combatant nations.