1939: Rain Quiets the Western Front

With both the Rhine and Moselle rivers in flood and German pumps working throughout the night to keep riverside pillboxes dry, the armies on the Western Front floundered in mud yesterday and held their operations to minimum patrolling to keep contact without pressing combat. Mud was so deep that the motorized materiel which the Germans brought to the front last week became mired in fields and made an easy target for harassing French artillery fire. As weather conditions grew steadily worse, neither the Allies nor the Germans showed the slightest indication of taking the offensive. — New York Herald Tribune, European Edition, Oct. 22, 1939

http://iht-retrospective.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/1939-rain-quiets-the-western-front/