German soldiers used the Mauser Gewehr 98 rifle, which had been in service since 1898. Regarded as an effective service weapon even in the Second World War, British infantrymen were trained to fire it at 15 rounds per minute and hit their target at an effective range of 550 yards. Each magazine carried ten rounds and it was named after the American inventor James Lee and the Royal Small Arms Factory located at Enfield in north London. The British Tommy was armed with the Short Magazine Lee–Enfield Rifle. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of 100,000 men was an army of volunteers. The German Army was conscripted and amounted to an awesome 9.9 million men. Unable to make a breakthrough, the opposing sides began to consolidate their ground by digging trenches. A hail of machine gun bullets and a torrent of shell fire would stop the mobile war at the Battle of the Aisne. Weapons of modern industrialised warfare would inflict horrendous casualties on an unprecedented scale. Opposed by machine gun fire and heavy howitzers, they were unable to penetrate the German positions on the heights north of the river and the war would descend rapidly into stalemate, where neither side could advance. 13,541 British soldiers lost their lives in futile attempts to break through the German lines of shallow trenches dug along the Chemin des Dames ridge, located north of the River Aisne. The Battle of the Aisne was fought in September 1914. The first trenches of the Western Front were dug along the Chemin des Dames and from there they would eventually stretch across Europe from the Swiss border to the North Sea.
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