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.