Most of the Belgian army (around 137,000 men) retreated and then held their part of the Western front, the Yserfront until 1918.

Several thousand men fled occupied Belgium via the Netherlands to Great Britain where they registered with the Belgian recruitment agencies. From the spring of 1915, the Germans closed this escape route with a heavily guarded border barrier along the Belgian-Dutch border, based on an deadly 200V electric fence, called "De Dodendraad" (The Wire of Death) by the Belgians. Smugglers then specialized in transferring war volunteers, but their numbers still declined. Among the 33,500 Belgian internees in the Netherlands, fewer and fewer soldiers fled to rejoin the field army behind the Yser. In October 1916, the Belgian government finally forbade the internees to flee.

Because the Belgian front sector was protected by large inundations which made German attacks difficult it was a relatively quiet sector of the trenches with no large operations comparable to the great battles at Ypres, the Somme or Verdun. The Belgians did refrain from larger actions because they knew they could not replace their losses.