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, great speed and a collapsing supply train, German troops charged through northern France, never allowing the battered Entente army to recover. Had General Helmut von Moltke hesitated for a single day, the operation would have been a resounding failure. Two key aspects of the Schlieffen Plan's success were the use of reconnaissance aircraft, giving Germany a decisive informational edge, and superior railway organisation, which was typically planned by a small army of staff officers to the minute. 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, 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.