ABSTRACT
The Schlieffen Plan, the blueprint of the Prussian General Staff for the defeat of France in the 1914 war, provided that the massed right wing of the German Army in the west should execute a wheeling movement hinged upon Diedenhofen-Metz, sweep through Belgium and, after clearing Northern France of the enemy, press him back against his fortress belt along the French-German frontier from Verdun to Belfort; the French, compelled to fight with their front reversed, would then be totally defeated. An old military concept to engage an enemy in his rear. Much of Prussia’s rise to power in the nineteenth century was due to successful battles of encirclement, one of the oldest forms of fighting in the enemy’s rear. Great Britain engaged in the war in the rear because, after Germany’s conquest of much of the European continent, it was in fact for a time the only war on land which Great Britain could fight there at all.
