restore movement to warfare. A few recognized these inconvenient facts. In Modern Weapons and Modern War (1900) the Polish banker Jan Bloch (1836–1902) argued that in the next major war ‘the spade will be as important as the rifle’. He predicted that the war of the future would be a stalemate. Cavalry charges would be obsolete. Entrenched men armed with machine guns would have at least a fourfold advantage over men coming towards them across open ground. Combatant nations would have to mobilize men in their millions, and the resultant stresses and strains would lead to ‘the break-up of the
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