how the blunders committed by a General. The most of them
are incapable of reasoning without using as a help here and there some
shreds of scientific military theory. The smallest of these fragments,
consisting in mere scientific words and metaphors, are often nothing
more than ornamental flourishes of critical narration. Now it is in the
nature of things that all technical and scientific expressions which
belong to a system lose their propriety, if they ever had any, as
soon as they are distorted, and used as general axioms, or as small
crystalline talismans, which have more power of demonstration than
simple speech.

Thus it has come to pass that our theoretical and critical books,
instead of being straightforward, intelligible dissertations, in which
the author always knows at least what he says and the reader what he
reads, are brimful of these technical terms, which form dark points of
interference where author and reader part company. But frequently they
are something worse, being nothing but hollow shells without any kernel.
The author himself has no clear perception of what he means, contents
himself with vague ideas, which if expressed in plain language would be
unsatisfactory even to himself.

A third fault in criticism is the MISUSE of HISTORICAL EXAMPLES, and a
display of great reading or learning. What the history of the Art of
War is we have already said, and we shall further explain our views on
examples and on military history in general in special chapters. One
fact merely touched upon in a very cursory manner may be used to support
the most opposite views, and three or four such facts of the most
heterogeneous description, brought together out of the most distant
lands and remote times and heaped up, generally distract and bewilder
the judgment and understanding without demonstrating anything; for when
exposed to the light they turn out to be only trumpery rubbish, made use
of to show off the author's learning.

But what can be gained for practical life by such obscure, partly false,
confused arbitrary conceptions? So little is gained that theory on
account of them has always been a true antithesis of practice, and
frequently a subject of ridicule to those whose soldierly qualities in
the field are above question.

But it is impossible that this could have been the case, if theory
in simple language, and by natural treatment of those things which
constitute the Art of making War, had merely sought