Before then, the German attacking and the British defending, the two armies had run a race to the sea. The Germans had hoped to win the race to turn the flank of the Allies. Not yet fully mobilized for war, they even threw in Ersatz Corps of ill-trained high school and university students to bolster their numbers and took 135,000 casualties in what the German people came to call the Kindermord, the murder of the children.
