The Battle of Gravelotte St. Privat, fought on August 18th came early in the Franco-Prussian War and, although a Pyrrhic victory for the Prussians their casualties were more than twice those of the French proved a strategic victory from which the French never recovered. Fought just west of the fortress city of Metz in Lorraine it followed a defeat inflicted on France the previous day at Mars-le-Tour, and was the final vindication of the tactics used by the brilliantly ruthless German C-in-C Field Marshal Hellmuth Von Moltke whose battle strategy if the subject of this absorbing book. The Prussian First and Second Armies, numbering 188,332