When Fuller returned to England after a brief posting to India (where he stoked his fascination with Eastern religion and mysticism), he resolved that the sweatier side of army life—drilling, marching, maneuvering—held no appeal for him and decided to escape into staff work. In 1913 he was accepted into the Staff College at Camberley, again on his second try. Fuller almost immediately got into trouble for trying to amend the army’s sacrosanct operating handbook, the Field Service Regulations. The FSR basically stated that war was simple, fighting principles were not particularly numerous or abstruse, and Napoléon pretty much knew everything that needed to be known.

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Perhaps due to his reputation as a prima donna and troublemaker, at the 1914 outbreak of war Fuller was assigned as a minor General Staff officer, while his schoolmates were sent to the front (where many were killed). Among Boney’s crucial tasks, he reorganized the filing system at his base, developed a sheep-evacuation plan in the event of a German invasion, and determined whether and how to deprive such invaders of alcohol in the area’s pubs. In March 1915, he finally managed to get into the action by insulting his commanding officer so thoroughly that the man shipped him out in retribution.

What Fuller found in France was the stalemate that would persist for most of the war. Frontal attacks were useless, as both sides fielded machine guns. Flanking attacks were impossible, as frontline trenches extended across the Continent from the Atlantic to Switzerland.

Fuller advocated a style of warfare based on mobility and penetration—that is, breakthrough on a limited front. (Twenty years later, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht would use those principles to develop its blitzkrieg concepts.) Another elementary principle on which Fuller predicated his style of war was mass: If you don’t outnumber your enemy, you probably can’t outfight him. “Do not let my opponents castigate me with the blather that Waterloo was won on the playfields of Eton,” he later wrote, “for the fact remains, geographically, historically and tactically, whether the Great Duke [of Wellington] uttered such undiluted nonsense or not, that it was won on fields in Belgium by carrying out a fundamental principle of war, the principle of mass; in other words by marching onto those fields three Englishmen, Germans or Belgians for every two Frenchmen.”

It was the tank, however, that would establish Fuller’s reputation as a tactician. So much so that some think he invented the modern armored vehicle, though in fact he became “an armor guy” well after Sir Ernest Swinton conceived the vehicle, after its first combat test at the September 1916 Battle of the Somme, and after Swinton and others had already developed and written about tank tactics.

Fuller later recalled his own epiphany. He’d gone to Yvranch, France, home of the army’s Heavy Section, as Tank Corps was then called, to watch the demonstration of a remarkable new weapon. (In fact, about all the Heavy Section was doing in those days was putting on daily maintenance-intensive dog-and-pony shows for visiting officers, sending its crude tanks to trundle over berms, cross trenches and, of course, crush trees like matchsticks.) “Everyone was talking and chatting,” Fuller wrote, “when slowly came into sight the first tank I ever saw. Not a monster but a very graceful machine with beautiful lines.…Here was the missing tool of penetration, the answer to the dominance on the battlefield of small-arms fire.” Fuller had found the antidote to the all-powerful machine gun.

Fuller’s first actual tank operation was the April 1917 Battle of Arras. As a demonstration of the tank’s capability the operation was a failure, at least in part because tankers ignored Fuller’s advice to deploy en masse and instead fed the tanks—mostly clapped-out training vehicles shipped from England—into battle a few at a time. Nor did it help that the army insisted on a traditional pre-attack artillery bombardment, a tactic anathema to Fuller, as it both eliminated any element of surprise and so thoroughly chewed up the ground that many of the tanks were immobilized.

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