Repington’s charge is one more frequently directed at the French army. But all armies in the decade before the First World War confronted the problem of how to mount an attack across a fire-swept battlefield. It was not sufficient to say that the defensive was the stronger form of warfare - nor was it necessarily true, as the First World War was itself to show. To win, an army had eventually to attack. The general solution was for the attacking troops to approach under cover, to close by breaking into small groups, advancing in bounds, and then to build
