Available for the first time in EnglishStaff officer, author, reformer - Louis Loyzeau de Grandmaison was one of France’s foremost military thinkers prior to the Great War. Facing him was the ultimate challenge: how to win a war in the 20th Century.

A key text in what would become known as the Cult of the Offensive, this is Grandmaison’s attempt to implement the lessons of the Boer and Russo-Japanese wars - to find a way for infantry to survive on a battlefield governed not by rifles and bayonets, but by trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns.