The German Army was in larger than all but the Russian at the outbreak of WW1, and it enjoyed many strengths, but observers evaluating it in hindsight tend to conflate quality with strategic and tactical disposition.

In the wake of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, French politics was infused with a powerful current of “revanchism” (literally revenge-ism). French military preparation for a war with Germany to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine, that many viewed as inevitable and necessary to “reclaim French honor”, was feverish. In addition to the expansion of Army and the broad implementation of mandatory military service, the French aggressively developed many military technologies. The French were the first to adopt smokeless powder in the 1880’s. And the quick-firing “French 75” artillery piece was revolutionary.

Unfortunately for the French, the Germans were observing this, and matched every advance. The Germans expanded their armed forces, adopted a better smokeless powder rifle, and developed Krupp artillery of their own that allowed fast firing. This race see-sawed throughout the 43 years between the wars, and in 1914 the Germans could be considered slightly ahead (though meaningful metrics are difficult to define).

In the decade prior to the war, the French took dubious lessons from the Japanese triumph in the Russo-Japanese War and embraced what GJ Meyer has called “the cult of the offensive”. They came to believe the daunting firepower of the age could be overcome with elan or “cran” (guts). This meant that the French developed a doctrine that focused on bayonets and light artillery in a direct fire role with relatively few heavy artillery pieces being employed in indirect fire and less reliance on machine guns.

The Germans did not actually differ enormously in their pre-war strategy, but avoided the monomania of the French. They developed more heavier quick firing guns that could be used in indirect fire and they deployed relatively more machine guns, though nothing like what would be used by the Germans later.

All told, both armies were of remarkable quality in August 1914, though the German was slightly larger owing to its larger population. The Germans triumphed in the opening two months of the conflict because they adopted a more effective strategy. At the start of hostilities the French, exactly as the German General Staff had anticipated, launched a massive assault to retake Alsace-Lorraine. The French displayed astonishing valor in these attacked, at one point losing 25,000 KILLED in a single day. But the French were attacking prepared positions without artillery preparation, which was effectively suicide using the technology of the day.

At the same time the Germans implemented their celebrated Schlieffen Plan, swinging through Belgium around the French left. When the French detached units to meet this thrust, they were badly outnumbered and did not enjoy prepared positions. So the Germans were able to take ground using more or less headlong charges. But this thrust was largely depleted by the end of September, and the Western Front crystallized into a continuous network of trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss boarder. This ended mobile warfare, which really not occur again until October of 1918.

As Winston Churchill has pointed out, the war in 1914 was almost a totally different conflict than that from 1915-1918. The Germans realized they could not advance again in 1915, and settled into defense everywhere in the West. Instead, encouraged by the triumph of Tannenberg, they decided to assail the Russians as the weaker opponent. The French and British therefore faced a continuous prepared defensive front unlike that the Germans had advanced through in 1914. Owing to the compactness of the front, the Germans could defend everything in a strength great enough to become effectively impenetrable to the technology and tactics of the era.

But the French saw it as necessary to do anything in their power to aid the Russians, who did not fare well in 1915. So they hurled themselves into insane assaults of the Germans as they feverishly tried to develop the tactics necessary to succeed. They mobilized their industry more completely than any of the Entente powers, and began to produce enormous numbers of heavy artillery pieces and machine guns. Meanwhile the British began mobilizing their population to provide an army large enough to be relevant on the mainland. (British contributions in 1914, while gallant, were tiny compared to the other combatants.)

Only in 1915-1916 did German and British/French doctrines start to clearly diverge. The reason for this is simple to see; they faced totally different tactical problems. The Germans worked feverishly to replace soldiers with machine guns, to stretch manpower in the west to provide assault troops in the east. The Western Allies meanwhile focused on heavier artillery, mortars, and light machine guns (“walking fire” weapons) to focus on taking trenches.

Later, when the Germans instituted storm troop tactics on the western front, they had benefited in this development from an incubator of ideas in the east. They were able to experiment on (and in some cases learn from) Russian forces that could not present as compact and impenetrable a front as that the Germans could in the narrower front they presented the British and French. Meanwhile, when the Germans met with brief success attacking the allies in the Spring Offensive if 1918, the British and French found themselves doing something at which they had much less experience: defending.

It is true that the French Army mutinied in 1917 after three years of ineffective bloody assaults. But they faced a psychological toll unlike any other army in that war (and probably history) had experienced. Note that the German Army began mutinying in 1918 which was much of the reason the war ended when it did. And at the end of the war, the French had suffered greater losses as a share of population than any other victorious democracy in history.

In the final phases of the war, both Britain and France had finally developed tightly controlled, carefully planned combined arms offensives that proved devastatingly effective at taking trenches. They completely controlled the battlefield for the last five months, despite Germany having removed Russia as a competitor.

So to summarize, saying the German Army was best misses a great deal of context. The Germans benefitted from being on the offensive at the right times and in the right places. Most of the war, they were able to defend, which conferred enormous advantage using the technology of the time. And in the end, the war ended because the German Army’s moral broke, and that of their opponents did not.

I recommend Max Hasting’s Catastrophe 1914 as an excellent volume on the first year of war. GJ Meyer’s the World Undone is probably the best single volume on the entire war, and touches on many of these issues.