If you ignore his pseudo-philosophical ravings, you can find a good description of the absurdity of trench warfare in Ernst Jünger's book In Stahlgewittern. For example, there is a connecting trench somewhere on Jünger's section of the front where dozens of people pass through each day. Every day, two or three people get killed there, just walking down the trench. Nobody bothers. It's normal.
The_Custodian: The Germans actually found a way to innovate around trench warfare without tanks. (Probably this is one of the reasons that they developed only one type of tank in all of WW1, the A7V which came very late.) Their invention was Sturmtruppen - yes, stormtroopers.
Highly trained elite soldiers armed mainly with hand grenades and submachine guns ('trench brooms'). Yes, the machine pistol was invented in Germany, more or less... A small group of stormtroopers would crack up a trench and proceed along it, evading all enemy strongholds, killing and maiming as many enemy personnel as possible though. Strongholds such as MG nests were to be dealt with by later waves of the attack. Stormtroopers were remarkably effective and became to the rest of the world the stereotype of the horrid efficiency the German war machine could exhibit. Thus maybe the word 'stormtrooper' became synonymous with 'SS' for many later on.