Editing The World Wars (section)

====Western Europe==== 
{{topquote|What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?<br>— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.<br>Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle<br>Can patter out their hasty orisons.<br>No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;<br>Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—<br>The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells<br>And bugles calling for them from sad shires.|Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"}}

Of all the fronts in WWI, Western Europe is the one that's been most documented and seared into the popular consciousness. It cut through Belgium and France all the way down to Switzerland. When Italy joined the Allies, the front was extended to across the Italo-Austrian border. Germany's Schlieffen Plan was intended to be used to quickly deal with France, and once France was broken troops could be diverted to support the Eastern Front. This didn't come to pass as diplomatic pressure caused troops to be diverted East, preventing their use in the Schlieffen Plan and resulting in the offensive against France stalling out short of its goal of capturing Paris. As neither side had a real advantage over the other, they were forced to dig in for the long haul, creating the conditions for trench warfare, the ugliest and most iconic aspect of WWI. This is where all the stereotypical images of the war originated: endless lines of trenches, forests and fields reduced to blasted, muddy moonscapes, barbed wire and rotting corpses everywhere, clouds of mustard gas, and soldiers armed with bolt-action rifles and bayonets charging into no-man's-land to be slaughtered in the thousands by machine guns and artillery. 

The front lines would effectively remain static throughout the war, though both sides made attempts to break the stalemate and resume a true offensive. The Entente attempted breakthroughs at the Battles of the Somme and Ypres, both of which ended in massive casualties for minimal gains. The British army suffered over 57,000 killed, wounded, and missing on the first day of the Somme, which is still the worst casualty rate in its history. Ypres was a series of battles fought in the same general area, collectively becoming known as the First through Fifth Battles of Ypres. Second Ypres saw the Germans' first mass deployment of chemical weapons, while Third Ypres, aka Passchendaele, resulted in somewhere between 400,000-800,000 casualties on both sides. Verdun was a 1916 attempt to knock France out of the war by attacking the fortified city of Verdun, a keystone of France's defensive line. The idea was to grind the French army down through sheer attrition; it backfired and wound up costing the Germans almost as many troops as it did the French (~336,000 German vs. ~379,000 French). Meanwhile, the Spring Offensive of 1918 was a last-ditch attempt to win the war after the Russian capitulation and before the Americans could show up in sufficient numbers to turn the tide. Some indicator of how well this was going to go came from Ludendorff himself, who declared that all the German army had to do was punch a hole in the Allied lines and they'd somehow just win from there. 

When Italy joined the fight, basically nothing changed except that the Austro-Hungarians now had to defend their western border in addition to their south and east. The only other significant nation to join the Allies in western Europe was Portugal, who were wooed by promises of protection for their colonial empire in Africa in exchange for joining the Entente.