The reinforcements came none too soon. After a number of local attacks another great offensive was launched on 11 November. It was on a wide front, but its main weight was astride that famous highway, the Menin road. The reserve divisions which had borne the brunt of the early attacks had now been nearly shot to pieces, and this thrust was made by two splendid regular divisions. South of the road British shrapnel and musketry time after time broke up the waves of the attack and foiled every effort to re-form them. North of the road a division of the Prussian Guard punched a hole, and its troops began to pass through. There was nothing in front of them but the British gun-line, some batteries firing at them point-blank.

At the critical moment the troops who had broken through hesitated. A ragged counter-attack in which cooks and batmen took part closed the breach. As a captured Prussian Guards officer was being taken back past a British battery he asked his escort: ‘What have you behind that?’ ‘Divisional headquarters,’ he was answered. ‘Almighty God!’ was his summing up.

Much more fighting followed, but the crisis ended that day, and with it open warfare virtually ended too, not to reappear in the west until the year 1918, and only in a limited form then. The British had lost some fifty thousand men killed, wounded, and missing at Ypres. French accounts do not distinguish losses in the Battle of Ypres from others, but there were more French troops engaged, though in general not quite so heavily, and casualties must have been as high or higher. German losses in this phase of the war have never been published, but figures which are partial as regards time and place point to their having been greater than those of the three allies combined. In one sense Britain was the most cruelly hit. Her small and precious regular army was fast melting away and she had nothing behind it but good raw material.

Joffre still hoped to break through into the open. In December he attacked in Artois, north of Arras, with little or no success. A few days later he launched an offensive in Champagne which did no better and was enormously costly on both sides—a mere killing match, in fact. From time to time the word ‘Hartmannswillerkopf’—a peak in the Vosges—appeared in communiqués, few who read them realizing that in the bloody little combats fought 3,000 feet up, probably in snow and ice, certainly under the heavy snow-laden skies that cap the Vosges in winter, gains and losses could be measured by yards.

Gradually the bits of trench, scratched in the ground, irrespective of tactical siting, wherever an advance had come to an end, were linked together, deepened, and when possible drained. Dug-outs which were at least splinter-proof appeared in them. Telephone cable in almost inextricable tangles ran along their sides. Reserve lines were dug, though nothing like the great systems, several thousands of yards deep, of the latter part of the war. In front stretched curtains of barbed wire on wooden stakes and later iron corkscrew pickets. The opposing forces became well-nigh invisible to each other, though observers on high ground with fixed telescopes saw occasional movement in the enemy’s lines. An infantryman might spend half of six months in the trenches—the other half being spent in billets, generally barns if he were a private soldier—without seeing a single enemy. And from the Swiss frontier to the English Channel this long snake-like excavation was being photographed from aircraft and reproduced on maps of 1/5,000 or even 1/2,500, on which the very latrines could be depicted.

Virtually no one, barring a Jewish scientist unheard of before the war and forgotten since, had expected this to occur. And yet the Russo-Japanese War might have served as a warning, for in it the opposing armies dug themselves in fairly thoroughly. There had been much entrenchment in the American Civil War, but the proportion of men to front or fronts was very much lower. In the First World War it was nearly always the case that, the fewer the men to the mile, the more open was the warfare.

Why did not one side or the other break through these defences, which remained very flimsy until at least the end of 1915? This book might be devoted entirely to the problem and then leave more to say. Writings on the subject, if typescript be included, would fill a library. The essence can, however, be given in a few words. The assault could never be driven through into open country fast and cleanly enough to prevent new lines of resistance being established and the defence congealing about the bulge, as skin re-establishes itself around a wound. The break-in could not be converted into a break-through. It looks a simple conundrum, and a hundred times men thought it solved, but it never was wholly solved.