How was trench warfare conducted in World War l?

After the opening months of the German invasion of France through Belgium in the late summer of 1914, the western front settled into a bloody stalemate. Trench warfare was an integral part of the fighting on this front. Both sides dug massive complexes of trenches which ran roughly parallel with each other across a front of hundreds of miles. Generally, trench warfare was a war of attrition where each side attempted to wear down the...

After the opening months of the German invasion of France through Belgium in the late summer of 1914, the western front settled into a bloody stalemate. Trench warfare was an integral part of the fighting on this front. Both sides dug massive complexes of trenches which ran roughly parallel with each other across a front of hundreds of miles. Generally, trench warfare was a war of attrition where each side attempted to wear down the other through frequent artillery bombardments. Sporadically, infantrymen would go "over the top" to attack the enemy across a "no man's land" strung with barbed wire and pocked by bomb craters. This region was also covered by machine guns, so these assaults were incredibly costly, and often totally futile. Occasionally, the war saw massive offensives like that against the French salient at Verdun, or the Allied offensive at the Somme River. These offensives cost literally millions of lives, and were generally inconclusive. It took American entry into the war to break the stalemate created by bloody trench warfare.