And therein lies the crux of the problem. Attrition sounds like a good word, and it does work, but it is a "little bit hard" of the troops using that method! The fact is, that from Christmas, 1914 to the German offensives in March/April 1918, the Western front was one big bloodbath with no gains for either side, except to kill and maim millions of men and expend millions of artillery rounds. Throwing ever larger masses of men at machine guns is not a logical way to fight a war!
No it's not, which is why the war wasn't really fought like that beyond 1915 by the French (Joffre fired), and 1916 by the Germans (Falkenhayn and Verdun). That's to say, when these commanders had the opportunity of picking the time, place and circumstances it usually wasn't.
(I.e. at Verdun the French were drawn into a slugfest based on Falkenhayn's ideas about the workability of attrition and the realisation that for political and symbolic reasons the French would be compelled to fight. Otherwise things did get a lot more sophistcated fairly quickly.)
Maybe it's a fair assesment to say that the British army stuck to massed ranks of men charging machineguns, or walking slowly towards them longer than the others, as late as at the Somme in 1916, which was rather longer than the rest?
By 1916 the French army had already started to rely on innovative artillery tactics to overcome heavy defenses. What hampered them was the lack of heavy guns. Access to these was limited by the speed with which the French armaments industry could churn them out. It wasn't a lack of understanding of how to use them.
Tank production was begun in 1916, and by war's end France had produced more tanks than all the other combatants combined. They were effectively used in the autumn 1917 Malmaison offensive, designed to show the French troops that they could attack the Germans and win big with low casualties of their own (18000 Frenchmen to 50000 Germans, 3000 French KIA to 14000 German KIA).
The big difference between the success of the small Malmaison offensive and the disaster of the huge 1917 Chemin-de-dames offensive, were 200 tanks were deployed, seems to have been reconnaissance. At Chemin-des-dames 1917 the Germans had withdrawn from the frontline the French attacked and went straight for the counter-attack. The French were unaware of this move. At Malmaison French aerial reconnaissance took insane amounts of photographs of the German position before, during and after the battle to make sure everyting about the situation was absolutely transparent to them. That was also what made it impossible to mount a major offensive with the same kind of care and attention to detail. There just wouldn't be enough planes, guns and tanks around necessary to make it work on a broader canvass.
From 1915 there was rushed design and production of a light portable machinegun for use by the French infantry. What they got in time for the 1917 spring offensive was the "Chauchat" light MG. It was a piece of junk, highly unreliable and the men hated them. Or rather, they hated them, but there was never any question about not bringing them along, the reason being that this was an absolutely essential piece of equipment. It allowed troops to take enemy position, quickly entrench, and meet the inevitable counterattack with auto-fire, which was the key to holding captured ground. It was in fact harder to hold ground than to take ground. The "chauchat" was hated because of its unreliability. When it worked it would win the battle and save your life. When it didn't, you died.
The British never came up with a light MG of their own. The Germans normally never provided their men with something more than the MG 08, which was a fairly heavy lump of metal to lug around, often mounted on some kind of sled to be pulled. The "chauchat" you could throw over your shoulder and sprint between the foxholes with. The Germans did come up with the first SMG, the "Machinenpistole 18" though. The order was put in already in 1915, and it was used in the 1918 offensives, but seemingly it was never produced in sufficient numbers, about 3000 by war's end. The "chauchat" otoh was produced in 250.000 copies during the war. 50.000 or so went to the US army in France.
Really, the French army in WWI is extraordinarily interesting both for the hole-in-the-head tactics used in 1914-15 and for the tactical and technological sophistication of it from 1916 onwards. They may have started out suicidal, but went for machinery and firepower in ways the British and Germans wouldn't (the Brits) or couldn't (the Germans).
The flip side of that might actually be how British commanders, not least the reliable Gallophobe Haig, would slag the French off for being cowards when their commanders had drawn the logical conclusions re. the impossibility of wall-of-meat-tactics, and decided not to attempt things beyond their technological capabilities. Until late 1918 that limited them to small tactical battles where they could cram enough firepower into a small sector to take the German defenders out without exorbitant casualties among their own men. When they strayed from that recipy, most importantly Nivelle's 1917 offensive, they got hurt, badly.
