exaggerated language of military history--"annihilated."

The first is this: You can break up its cohesion by a smashing blow
delivered somewhere along its line, and preferably near its centre.
But if you do that, the results will never be quite complete, and may
be incomplete in any degree according to the violence and success of
your blow.

The second way is to get round the enemy with your superior numbers,
to get past his flank, to the back of him, and so envelop him. If that
manoeuvre is carried out successfully, you bag his forces entire. It
is to this second manoeuvre that modern Prussian strategy and tactics
are particularly attached. It is obvious that its fruits are far more
complete than those of the first manoeuvre, when, or if, it is wholly
successful. For to get round your enemy and bag him whole is a larger
result than merely to break him up and leave _some_ of him able to
re-form and perhaps fight again. Two things needful to such success
are (_a_) superior numbers, save in case of gross error upon the part
of the opponents; (_b_) great rapidity of action on the part of the
outflanking body, coupled, if possible, with surprise. That rapidity
of action is necessary is obvious; for the party on the flank has got
to go much farther than the rest of the army. It has to go all the
length of the arrow (1), and an element of surprise is usually
necessary. For if the army AA which BB was trying to outflank learned
of the manoeuvre in time he only has to retreat upon his left by the
shorter arrow (2) to escape from the threatened clutch.

[Illustration: Sketch 45.]

Now, von Kluck with his five army corps, four of which were in
operation against Sir John French, was well able to count on all
these elements. He had highly superior numbers, his superiority had
not been discovered until it was almost too late, and for rapidity of
action he had excellent railways and a vast equipment of petrol
vehicles.

What he proposed to do was, while engaging the British contingent of
less than two army corps with three full army corps of his own, to
swing his extreme western army corps right round, west through
Tournai, and so turn the British line. If he succeeded in doing that,
he had at the same time succeeded in turning the whole of the
Franco-British forces on the Sambre and Meuse. In other words, he was
in a fair way to accomplishing the destruction of the operative corner
of the great square, and consequently, as a