s of events, we do not ask
ourselves whether this possession may not lead to greater disadvantages
hereafter. How often we find this mistake recurring in military history.

We might say that, just as in commerce the merchant cannot set apart and
place in security gains from one single transaction by itself, so in
War a single advantage cannot be separated from the result of the whole.
Just as the former must always operate with the whole bulk of his means,
just so in War, only the sum total will decide on the advantage or
disadvantage of each item.

If the mind's eye is always directed upon the series of combats, so far
as they can be seen beforehand, then it is always looking in the right
direction, and thereby the motion of the force acquires that rapidity,
that is to say, willing and doing acquire that energy which is suitable
to the matter, and which is not to be thwarted or turned aside by
extraneous influences.(*)

(*) The whole of this chapter is directed against the
theories of the Austrian Staff in 1814. It may be taken as
the foundation of the modern teaching of the Prussian
General Staff. See especially von Kammer.--ED.

CHAPTER II. ELEMENTS OF STRATEGY

THE causes which condition the use of the combat in Strategy may be
easily divided into elements of different kinds, such as the moral,
physical, mathematical, geographical and statistical elements.

The first class includes all that can be called forth by moral qualities
and effects; to the second belong the whole mass of the military force,
its organisation, the proportion of the three arms, &c. &c.; to the
third, the angle of the lines of operation, the concentric and eccentric
movements in as far as their geometrical nature has any value in
the calculation; to the fourth, the influences of country, such as
commanding points, hills, rivers, woods, roads, &c. &c.; lastly, to the
fifth, all the means of supply. The separation of these things once for
all in the mind does good in giving clearness and helping us to estimate
at once, at a higher or lower value, the different classes as we pass
onwards. For, in considering them separately, many lose of themselves
their borrowed importance; one feels, for instance, quite plainly that
the value of a base of operations, even if we look at nothing in it but
its relative position to the line of operations, depends much less in
that simple form on the geometrical element of the angle whic