Instead, some features shift to the advanced form at the beginning of the process, while others stay resolutely primitive until near the end.

ECONOMIST: How new groups of creatures emerge

John Erickson makes something of the comparison between the great tsarist offensive in 1916 under Brusilov and Zhukov's operation in 1944 to clear the Germans from Belarus, showing in the process that the armies of both wars were not the primitive, poorly led, forces often depicted in western literature.

ECONOMIST: 20th-century history