The year 1916 was the year of the Battle of the Somme. As the year opened, the two great opposing armies remained deadlocked in a line of trenches, which stretched 966 kilometres from the Belgian coast through France to the frontiers of Switzerland. Here, men faced each other over the strewn, decaying wastes of No Man's Land, and confronted the realities of dirt, disease and death. Although the great advantage of trench warfare lay with the defence, …showed first 75 words of 5756 total…

…showed last 75 words of 5756 total…that they had inflicted the first serious defeat on their German opponents since the war of movement had ground to a halt in the winter of 1914. Falkenhayn was replaced as German Chief of Staff by Hindenburg, and the Germans increasingly relied on defence in depth. The Germans built a new system of concrete defences known as the 'Hindenburg Line', to compensate for the enormous damage caused to their forces by the Battle of the Somme.