#45, First Battle of Ypres: The Slaughter That Killed Europe's Professional Armies
The First Battle of Ypres from October to November 1914 consumed approximately 250,000 total casualties, 130,000 German, 58,000 French, and 58,000 British. These weren't conscripts; these were the prewar professional soldiers of Europe's finest armies, and when the guns fell silent at Ypres, they were largely gone. Germany's volunteer student battalions attacked singing patriotic songs and were machine-gunned in rows, an event Germans called the "Kindermord bei Ypern", the Massacre of the Innocents.
The BEF's original seven divisions, the "Old Contemptibles", were reduced to skeletal cadres. The 1st Battalion Scots Guards went into battle with 850 men and emerged with 60. Yet they held. The German Fourth and Sixth Armies failed to break through to the Channel ports, and the front line at Ypres would barely move for the next four years. First Ypres marked the end of maneuver warfare on the Western Front and the beginning of trench deadlock. The professional armies of 1914 were replaced by mass citizen armies that would fight and die in the same salient through two more devastating battles before the war's end.
