What do you make of this the clash of two modern armies is one huge battle spread over space and time in which the smaller battles fought by the army corps would form the tactical encounters of traditional battles These large numbers of battles that would take place far away from one another as the individual corps or groups of corps came into contact with the enemy would be welded together by the commander in chief into a complete battle The individual smaller battles would be given significance by the commander in chief s plan Just as a commander of old gave units particular goals on the battlefields of days past a modern commander in chief would give specific goals to his army corps Each would play a part in the overall plan The success of battle today depends more upon conceptual coherence than on territorial proximity Thus one battle might be fought in order to secure victory on another battlefield German Strategy and the path to Verdun Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition 1870 1916 by Robert Foley P 66 Most of it is a paraphrase by Foley with some quotation of Alfie Schlieffen taken from War Today in another Foley effort Schlieffen s Military Writings pp 198 201 I have the impression that the operational space in the Great War was rather narrow being the thin line where corps could manoeuvre under covering fire from artillery and machine guns either side of no man s land until one army was too weak to contain its opponent The German elastic method after linear defence was overwhelmed by the Entente s material superiority was intended to create an encounter battle with the Germans having home advantage yet the British confounded it once Plumer got his way Motorisation wireless aircraft etc in the 30s and 40s widened the operational space at times to several hundred miles rather than several hundred yards but then again much of the fighting and most of the decisive fighting in WWII took place over the same distances as in WWI