Placing full confidence in their original plan, most of Germany's troops were placed in the right wing of the front dedicated to the Schlieffen Plan, an all-out attack meant to decapitate the French state by capturing Paris and its industrial zones. With enormous losses and great speed, German troops charged through northern France, never allowing their battered army to recover. It was only until they met the river Seine in the winter, when the Second Siege of Paris began, that the Deutsches Heer could not continue offensive operations of such momentum. The French, reinforced by British troops, and now guaranteed to receive American support, were confident in an eventual hard-earned victory through attrition. But the failures of the Russian Army and the British Navy would deprive them of this luxury.
By the time the Schlieffen Plan came to a halt, the western front had evolved into a new, gruesome kind of war, what is now known as trench warfare. A stalemate followed, in which neither Franco-British nor German troops could push the other side.