ABSTRACT
Liddell Hart’s Strategy of the Indirect Approach was not, as he was the first to acknowledge, original. It had been a major factor in, if not the sole cause of, the successful waging of battles, campaigns and wars long before Liddell Hart had proposed its virtues. Indeed the first examples of its employment that he cited occurred during the Græco-Persian Wars that began in 490 BC. Why then did his published work on the subject1 attract the admiring attention that it did? At least part of the explanation was that his readership was as infected as he himself was with a deep sense of horror at the appalling slaughter that had been such a notable feature of the battles on the Western Front. Indeed it was this horror that provided the most powerful spur to Liddell Hart’s search for an alternative to a war of attrition with all its inevitable blood letting. 2 The Indirect Approach seemed alluringly to offer precisely that alternative and it was seized upon with enthusiasm.
