Funny yes, but that was more-less everyone's strategy in WW1...
At the risk of taking a joke seriously, it really wasn't.
It's easy to write off the battles of WW1 as showing a lack of ability to learn - what they instead show is a lack of a "magic bullet" to easily solve the problem of the trenches. As it turned out, it took a combination of new technology, superior production and sheer hard work to solve things.
A little illustration of the problems involved - this time, at the Somme.
At the Somme, you first had the political problem - this attack was required not because it was an easy place to attack but to give succor to allies. As such it was not possible to pick the "easiest" place to attack.
(But because machine guns and trenches are cheap and easy, there's no flank to outflank. Wherever you attack there will be machine guns, there will be trenches and there will be barbed wire.)
Second you have the military problem - whatever way you slice it, there are a large number of Germans in that trench and they want to kill you as much as you want to kill them. They've spent at least a year learning how to
defend, they've sited machine guns and barbed wire, and it's going to be costly no matter what you do unless you can somehow kill them all before you arrive.
The generals decide to try simply doing that - killing everyone in the German trenches. As such, they send in a week long preparatory bombardment. This involves a huge amount of firepower - so much firepower that the guns can be heard across the Channel and the ground is churned to craters.
Now you have one of the problems that will be solved in the war, but has not yet. When do you attack?
Remember that you need to plan this days in advance, since you're going to be moving hundreds of thousands of men, and if you order the attack too soon you're going to blow up your entire assault wave as they advance into the teeth of the artillery barrage.
Would you like to try to coordinate tens of thousands of people across an area several miles deep and over a dozen miles wide to stop at exactly the same time?
Later in the war, they learned how to do it - they learned how to do the creeping barrage, which is something which is frankly insanely risky with any of the guns anyone had used in any war before then. You absolutely
need recuperators to pull off a creeping barrage, anything else means you can't control the gun targets well enough.
So much for that yet-unsolved problem.
Next you have the ultimate problem, the one that stymied Napoleon at Waterloo. How do you advance under fire?
It's hard enough for trained regular troops with experience. But most of the British army didn't exist two years ago, and the sudden expansion caught
everyone on the hop - many of the New Army divisions drilled with broom handles in civilian clothes for much of the time since volunteering.
Not surprisingly, the generals feel that they can't trust them doing coordinated rushes over fire-swept ground. This is probably a correct assumption.
But more important is that they don't
clump. If you have men in a long line abreast, they're easy to shoot down with a machine gun slowly traversing along them; if they clump up, they're all dead in seconds because the gun can just aim at the clump.
And they can't run, either. If they run, they'll be exhausted at the end - if you don't appreciate this problem, try running up a muddy hill wearing full combat gear.
So a brisk walk in long, even lines is actually the best you can do.
But why do they need to do that at all? Why can't they use tanks to break the defensive line?
Tanks! That's what you need... but they've only just been invented. (Two and a half months after the start of the battle, there are 49 tanks available to be deployed in support of eleven divisions - and that was still considered too soon.) The commander of the army ordered a thousand the moment he saw one, but it takes time to produce engines on that scale and it takes time to get the tanks to the front. They are being made as fast as they can.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us decrying generals for sending men to briskly walk at machine guns. Despite that the generals did everything they could do to make sure the attack succeeded with the troops they had, and that anything else would have probably been worse.
TL;DR it's easy, from the distance of a century, to ask why the things you're so familiar with didn't occur to men struggling with all their wit to completely reinvent warfare.
EDIT: One example of getting it wrong from the distance of a century what they got right at the time is the magazine cutoff. It sounds silly - why would you take a ten-shot weapon and turn it into a one-shot weapon - but the answer can be summed up in a simple question.
What do you do when the enemy counterattack?
With the magazine cutoff, the answer is a bit simpler. You slide back the cutoff, effectively giving you nine rounds instantly, and deliver aimed fire on the counterattacking enemy.