Fighting around Ypres would flicker on until 22 November 1914, the date chosen by the official historians to denote the First Battle's termination. The British survivors, whose unwounded numbers were less than half of the 160,000 which the BEF had sent to France, were by then stolidly digging and embanking to solidify the line their desperate resistance over the preceding five weeks had established in the face of the enemy...Everywhere the Germans held the high ground, dominating the shallow crescent of trenches the British, who were to be its guardians for most of the coming war of attack and defence, would call "The Salient." Its winning had cost uncountable lives, French as well as British. The Germans, "whose vanguards had known in the plains of Flanders life and purpose for the last time," had lost even more heavily. At least 41,000 of the German volunteers, the Innocents of Ypres, had fallen outside its walls.
They represented but a fraction of all the dead of the Battles of the Frontiers, of the Great Retreat, of the Marne, of the Aisne, of the "Race to the Sea" and of First Ypres itself. The French army, with a mobilised strength of two million, had suffered by far the worst. Its losses in September, killed, wounded, missing and prisoners, exceeded 200,000, in October 80,000 and in November 70,000; the August losses, never officially revealed, may have exceeded 160,000. Fatalities reached the extraordinary total of 306,000, representing a tenfold increase in normal mortality among those aged between twenty and thirty; 45,000 of those under twenty had died, 92,000 of those between twenty and twenty-four, 70,000 of those between twenty-five and twenty-nine. Among those in their thirties, the death toll exceeded 80,000. All deaths had fallen on a male population of twenty million and more particularly on the ten million of military age. Germany had lost 241,000, including 99,000 in the 20-24 age group, out of a male population of thirty-two million. Belgium, out of 1,800,000 men of military age, had suffered 30,000 dead, a figure that was to recur with gruesome consistency in each succeeding year of the war. The total was the same as that for British deaths, with the difference that the British dead had almost all belonged to the regular army and its reserve of time-expired volunteer soldiers...
The prospect of any offensive, either by the Allies or the Germans, looked far away as winter fell in France at the end of 1914. A continuous line of trenches, 475 miles long, ran from the North Sea to the mountain frontier of neutral Switzerland. Behind it the opposing combatants, equally exhausted by human loss, equally bereft of re-supplies to replace the peacetime stocks of munitions they had expended in the previous four months of violent and extravagant fighting, crouched in confrontation across a narrow and empty zone of no man's land.
From The First World War by John Keegan, p. 135