Western Front

British soldiers leaving for a night raid into ‘No Man's Land’ between the trenches, in 1914. The night patrols on the Western Front were sent out to obtain information about the enemy. Soldiers faced rockets and belts of barbed wire, sometimes more than 30 m/98 ft deep, just in front of the front-line trenches.

Battle zone in World War I between Germany and its enemies France and Britain, extending as lines of trenches from Nieuport on the Belgian coast through Ypres, Arras, Albert, Soissons, and Rheims to Verdun, constructed by both Germany and the Allies.

For over three years neither side advanced far from their defensive positions. During the period of trench warfare there were a number of significant changes. Poison gas was used by Germany at Ypres, Belgium in April 1915 and tanks were employed by Britain on the River Somme in September 1916. A German offensive in the spring of 1918 enabled its troops to reach the Marne River. However, the entry of the USA into the war in 1917 tipped the balance on the Western Front decisively in favour of the Allies. With the boost of hundreds of thousands of new troops and the increasingly fragile situation in Germany, the Allies were able to launch fresh attacks. By summer the Allies were advancing all along the front and the Germans were driven back into Belgium.

Life on the Western Front for a World War I soldier was dominated by the trenches, where conditions were water-logged and squalid. Warfare was marked by long periods of tension and inactivity punctuated by mass offensives that wreaked death and destruction on a horrifying scale but produced little result for either side.