The first major battle of the Great War came a month after the German army had moved into Belgium with the intention of quickly overcoming French resistance, taking Paris and in the south, overrunning the defences at Verdun. Between September 5th and 12th 1914 six French armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) stopped the advance, forced the Germans to retreat and set the stage for four years of trench warfare on what became known as 'The Western Front'. With only small adjustments, this line was a stalemate and was virtually the same in 1918.
The BEF was mainly highly trained regular soldiers, there hadn't been time to get the new volunteers kitted up, trained and out to the front. The fire discipline of the regulars was so good that many German commanders thought they were under machine gun fire when in fact it was rapid fire with the standard infantry rifle, the Lee Enfield SMLE which was a shorter version of the same rifle used in the Boer War.
The 750,000 volunteers recruited between August and the end of 1914 had to be trained and equipped and this placed a great strain on the organisers. In many cases, obsolete rifles were issued to the new recruits and the scale of supplying the army with everything it needed had to be expanded rapidly. One problem was the fact that transport relied almost exclusively on horses. Some idea of the scale of this can be got from one surprising fact, the weight of feed for the horses on the Western Front which had to be sent out from Britain was greater than the weight of ammunition of all calibres. Army agents roamed the country requisitioning horses and forage. All these men and the supplies had to be transported to France, the railways were working flat out and shipping had to be requisitioned or hired to get them across the Channel.
Once over in France, the Army Staff had to face an entirely new set of problems. Tactics and communications hadn't advanced since the Boer War. The first stage of the war was dominated by the problems of controlling large armies moving rapidly against each other. The first problem was knowing where your men were and the second was getting messages to and from them. In September 1914 the only way to do this was to send out mounted observers and use runners or in some cases, cyclists to carry written messages to and fro. Telephone lines could be used between static points but were no good when an army was moving about the countryside.
The best way to describe what was happening is that it was a steep learning curve and the rules had to be made up as you went along. The saving grace was that the Germans had the same problems and the battle became known as 'The Miracle of the Marne' because, against all the odds, the German advance was stopped before Paris was reached and never advanced any further during the next four years.
Horses being requisitioned in a country market.