Germany had a bold plan for winning the Great War in weeks, not years, and the key element was a rapid and overwhelming advance into northern France through Belgium, which began on August 2nd.

The French military had an inkling of what the Germans were up to, although the full theory of the German offensive is not clear to them even now.

French military planners had a response already prepared, a counteroffensive into Germany, ready to launch as early as the 10th day of mobilization,

which would cut off any German offensive and retake the lands lost so bitterly in 1871.

But the French had underestimated German daring, and it almost led to the fall of France.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century. Episode 84. So much the better.

Two weeks ago, we followed the initial German advance into Belgium, that the Germans might consider using Belgian territory to do an end

run around the French fortifications at Verdun and Toul had been foreseen by the French.

They thought they had an adequate answer to a German thrust through Belgium, and that's

what we're going to talk about today. But before we get going with the war, I need to review some military terminology,

so I can put this into words properly, and so that you can understand what I'm talking about.

And maybe I should have done this before I got into the war, but I felt like I spent plenty of

time on the preliminaries as it was. And anyway, as long as we were only talking about the invasion of

Belgium, I felt like I could safely skip it. But now that we're talking about very large formations,

we need to develop a new vocabulary. I've touched on some of this before, and I'm sure some of

you already know all this, but I hope you'll bear with me anyway, because, well, it's going to be a long war.

I've already bandied about the word division.

As things stand, on the Western Front in August 1914, the Belgian and British armies have about six divisions each.

The German and French armies facing each other are composed of about six divisions each. The German and French armies facing each other

are composed of about 70 divisions each. A division is a pretty large formation. They vary in size

from army to army, and often even within the same army. But if you think of a division as

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