While Italy maintained its neutral position, in the rest of Europe the war raged on various fronts. At first German forces penetrated rapidly into France while Russian forces penetrated towards the West. But in the space of a few weeks the hope that this would be only a short conflict turned out to be futile; the consolidation of the front lines led to positional warfare and several kilometres of trenches began to be excavated.
The first action by the Germans was the implementation of the so-called Schlieffen Plan. By means of a rapid mobilization of its troops, Germany tried to outflank the French army and occupy Paris. This plan rendered the invasion of Belgium necessary so that the right wing of the formation would advance and keep the French troops locked within a pincer movement. In a short time the German soldiers advanced and by the start of September they were only forty kilometres away from the capital.
French resistance, helped by an intervention by the British and by the opening of the eastern front, led to the defeat of the Germans in the First Battle of the Marne and the German forces were forced in this way to stop their advance.
On the eastern front things unfolded in a way that was completely unexpected for the empire of William II. Russia in fact succeeded in organizing its troops in a very short time and pushed towards Eastern Prussia (now the region of Kaliningrad), forcing Germany to send its forces even to this new front. At the end of August the German generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff succeeded in stopping the Tsarist army at Tannenberg and stabilized this front which was able to hold out up to the Russian crisis of 1917.
In the meantime other states joined the war and extended the conflict even to Asia: in October 1914 the Ottoman Empire lined up alongside the Triple Alliance and opened up another front on the Caucasus against British possessions in the Middle East. On 23rd August Japan, an ally of Russia, successfully attacked German possessions in the Far East, especially at Tsingtao, a Chinese city in the North of Shanghai.
