And in World War I, war was perceived to be necessary and often even glorious. The trench warfare on the Western Front is most famous for its brutal futility. Great Britain and France on one side, Germany on the other, with no man's land in between. World War I was a writer's war, and there's a lot of metaphorical resonance in living men digging holes where they would in time die. The lines of trenches on the Western Front covered only about 400 miles as the crow flies, but because of the endless zigzagging, the trenches themselves may have run as much as 25,000 miles. But the stalemate of trench warfare wasn't seen on every front. Especially at the beginning of the war, there was a lot of offensive movement, especially in the initial German strikes.