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On the night of 26 August 1914, the Allies withdrew from Le Cateau to St. Quentin. [10]With retreat all along the line, the commander-in-chief of the French forces, Joseph Joffre, needed the Fifth Army (General Charles Lanrezac) to hold off the German advance with a counter-attack, despite a 4 mi (6.4 km) separation from the French Fourth Army on the right flank and the continual retreat of ...
The early French initiative, to capture territory lost to the Germans in the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, which France started, was played out in a series of frontier battles between the Germans and the French, known collectively as the Battle of the Frontiers.
French cavalry during World War I played a relatively minor role in events. As mounted combatants proved highly vulnerable to the firepower of infantry and artillery , the various units of this arm essentially carried out auxiliary missions during the " Great War " (from 1914 to 1919), even if the beginning of the conflict corresponded to its ...
The Battle of Albert was the first two weeks of Anglo-French offensive operations in the Battle of the Somme. The Allied preparatory artillery bombardment began on 24 June and the Anglo-French infantry attacked on 1 July, on the south bank from Foucaucourt to the Somme and from the Somme north to Gommecourt, 2 mi (3.2 km) beyond Serre.
Verdun has become for the French the representative memory of the First World War, comparable to how the Battle of the Somme is viewed in the United Kingdom and Canada. [125] Antoine Prost wrote, "Like Auschwitz, Verdun marks a transgression of the limits of the human condition". [126] From 1918 to 1939, the French expressed two memories of the ...
The Battle of Mons was the first major action of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the First World War. It was a subsidiary action of the Battle of the Frontiers , in which the Allies clashed with Germany on the French borders.
French infantry pushing through enemy barbed wire, 1915. During World War I, France was one of the Triple Entente powers allied against the Central Powers.Although fighting occurred worldwide, the bulk of the French Army's operations occurred in Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Alsace-Lorraine along what came to be known as the Western Front, which consisted mainly of trench warfare.
The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was the six divisions the British Army sent to the Western Front during the First World War.Planning for a British Expeditionary Force began with the 1906–1912 Haldane Reforms of the British Army carried out by the Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane following the Second Boer War (1899–1902).