Trenches instead of Boulevards - Germans stopped by Machine Guns (b/w photo)

A Belgian soldier smokes a cigarette during a fight between Dendermonde and Oudegem, Belgium, in 1914. Germany had hoped for a swift victory against France, and invaded Belgium in August of 1914, heading into France. The German army swept through Belgium, but was met with stiffer resistance than it anticipated in France. The Germans approached to within 70 kilometers of Paris, but were pushed back a ways, to a more stable position, which would become battlefields lined with trenches, fought over for years. In this opening month of World War I, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded -- France suffered its greatest single-day loss on August 22nd, when more than 27,000 soldiers were killed by rifle and machine-gun, thousands more wounded.