Free A History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld

War
, was published in 1805. It was submitted to Napoleon who, according to its author, is said to have expressed his appreciation. From that point on he steadily added to it without, however, changing its essence. In his most mature work,
The Art of War
(1837) he had much to say about the political uses to which war could be put and also about the resources and military institutions of different states. At the same time he extended his theory to include formations, tactics, various kinds of special operations such as the crossing of rivers, and logistics. The last-named were defined as “the practical art of moving armies.” There is even a short chapter on “Descents, or Maritime Expeditions.” If Clausewitz in
vom Kriege
accused Jomini of having concentrated merely on strategy to the detriment of the political side of war, this is due to the fact that the Prussian general did not live to see his rival’s most mature work.
    More to the point, Jomini like all his Enlightenment predecessors sought to create a “system” which would tell a commander how to conduct war on the higher level. Particularly in his earlier works, this objective forced him to present war as more rational than it really is, given that only the rational can be systematically analyzed, systematized, and taught. The same was even more true of the Enlightenment as a whole. From about 1770 on, this view came under attack at the hand of the nascent Romantic Movement which insisted that the emotions of the heart, not calculations of the merely mechanical brain, stood at the center of human life. In the military field the most important critic was yet another Prussian officer, diplomat and scholar, Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst.
    Published in three volumes between 1796 and 1799, Berenhorst’s
Reflections on the Art of
War
began with a survey of military history. Antiquity had been the great period when the art of war, emerging from its primitive stage where it had been confined to raids, ambushes, skirmishes and the like, was perfected. Then came a long medieval interval marked by nothing but ignorance and disorder; then at some point between Machiavelli and Montecuccoli (Berenhorst had in mind Maurice of Nassau, the early seventeenth-century Dutch commander) order was restored and progress resumed. The very nature of their quest, however, had led all subsequent authors to overestimate the role of immutable laws while underestimating that of the unknown, uncontrollable forces of human will and emotion.
    Soldiers were more than robots who could fire so and so many rounds a minute. An army was not simply a machine moving along this axis or that and carrying out evolutions as its commander directed. It was the ever-variable, often unpredictable, state of mind of commanders and troops, and not simply calculations pertaining to time, distance, and the angles between lines of operations which governed victory and defeat, to say nothing about the role played by that great incalculable, chance.
    These arguments were illustrated by referring to Frederick the Great. To the majority of late eighteenth-century commentators the king was perhaps
the
greatest commander of recent times. His maneuvers, particularly the famous “oblique approach” in which one wing attacked the enemy while the other was kept back, were assiduously studied. Berenhorst, however, pointed to the fact that during some ten years of active operations in three wars (the First, Second, and Third Silesian Wars) those maneuvers had been carried out no more than two or three times. Those few and far-apart occasions aside, Frederick was primarily a drillmaster. Time after time he forced his troops into murderous battles. Those battles were won—if they were won, for Frederick’s defeats were about as numerous as his victories—only by virtue of iron discipline and sheer force of will.
    Well written and provided with plentiful examples, Berenhorst’s work was extremely popular during the years