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When we think of World War I, images of the bloody, muddy Western Front are generally what comes to mind. Scenes of frightened young men standing in knee-deep mud, awaiting the call to go "over the top", facing machine guns, barbed wire, mortars, bayonets, hand-to-hand battles, and more.

The stalemate on the Western Front lasted for four years, forcing the advancement of new technologies, bleeding the resources of the belligerent nations, and destroying the surrounding countryside.

When German forces met stiff resistance in northern France in 1914, a "race to the sea" developed as France and Germany tried to outflank each other, establishing battle lines that stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea.

Allies and Central Powers literally dug in, excavating thousands of miles of defensive trenches, and trying desperately to break through the other side for years, at unspeakably huge cost in blood and treasure. 

Looking out across a battlefield from an Anzac pill box near the Belgian city of Ypres in West Flanders in 1917. 

French soldiers on horseback with an airship flying behind them, 1914.

German officers in a discussion on the Western Front. The German war plan had been for a swift, decisive victory in France. Little planning had been done for a long-term, slow-moving slog of a battle.  

A downed German twin-engine bomber being towed through a street in France by Australian soldiers. 

Six German soldiers pose in a in trench with a machine gun, a mere 40 meters from the British line. The machine gun appears to be a Maschinengewehr 08, or MG 08, capable of firing 450-500 rounds a minute. 

Harnessed dogs pull a British Army machine gun and ammo, 1914. These weapons could weigh as much as 150 pounds.

German observation balloon at Equancourt, France, on September 22, 1916. 

British soldiers struggle to pull a huge piece of artillery through the mud. The gun has been placed on a track created for a light railway.

Members of New Zealand's Maori Pioneer Battalion perform a "Haka" for New Zealand's Prime Minister William Massey and Deputy Prime Minister Sir Joseph Ward in Bois-de Warnimont, France, on June 30, 1918.

In France, a British machine-gun team. The gun, which appears to be a Vickers, is mounted on the front of a motorcycle side car.

A German prisoner, wounded and muddy, helped by a British soldier along a railway track. 1916.

Three dead German soldiers outside their pill box near Zonnebeke, Belgium. 

Dead horses are buried in a trench after the Battle of Haelen which was fought by the German and Belgian armies on August 12, 1914 in Belgium.  

British soldiers standing in mud on the French front line 1917. 

Mountains of shell casings on the roadside near the front lines, the contents of which had been fired into the German lines. 

A French soldier smokes a cigarette, standing near the bodies of several soldiers, apparently Germans, near Souain, France, ca. 1915.

Soldiers in trenches write letters home. Life in the trenches was summed up by the phrase which later became well-known: "Months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror."

At Cambrai, German soldiers load a captured British Mark I tank onto a railroad, in November of 1917. 

British and Canadian forces pushed through German defenses at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April of 1917, advancing as far as six miles in three days, retaking high ground and the town of Thelus, at the cost of nearly 4,000 dead. 

An artillery shell explodes near trenches dug into the ground of Fort de la Pompelle, near Reims, France.  

Bodies of allied soldiers strewn about a bombed landscape in "No Man's Land" in front of the Canadian lines at Courcelette in 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.

Canadian soldiers tend to a fallen German soldier on the battlefield at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917.

French soldiers wearing gas masks in a trench, 1917.

Gassed patients are treated at the 326th Field Hospital near Royaumeix, France, on August 8, 1918.

A French soldier wearing a gas mask, 1916. 

British soldiers and Highlanders with German prisoners walk past war ruins and a dead horse, after the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge, part of the Third Battle of Ypres in September of 1917. 

A horse is restrained while it is attended to at a veterinary hospital in 1916. 

A group of British soldiers are sorting through equipment abandoned in the trenches by the Germans when St Pierre Divion was captured. 

Bringing Canadian wounded to the Field Dressing Station, Vimy Ridge in April of 1917. German prisoners assist in pushing the rail car. 

On the British front, Christmas Dinner, 1916, in a shell hole beside a grave.

British MkIV "Bear" tank, abandoned after battle near Inverness Copse, on August 22 , 1917.

A mine tunnel is dug under the German lines on the Vosges front, on October 19, 1916. The sappers worked at a depth of about 17 meters, until they reached a spot below enemy positions, when large explosives would be placed and later detonated, destroying anything above.

Men wounded in the Ypres battle of September 20th, 1917. Walking along the Menin road, to be taken to the clearing station. German prisoners are seen assisting at stretcher bearing.