attle at Katholisch
Hennersdorf, in Lusatia, and the battle of Kesseldorf, before this peace
took place, still we cannot say that the moral effect of the battle of
Soor was nil.

(*) Soor, or Sohr, Sept. 30, 1745; Hennersdorf, Nov. 23,
1745; Kealteldorf, Dec. 15, 1745, all in the Second Silesian
War.

If it is chiefly the moral force which is shaken by defeat, and if the
number of trophies reaped by the enemy mounts up to an unusual height,
then the lost combat becomes a rout, but this is not the necessary
consequence of every victory. A rout only sets in when the moral force
of the defeated is very severely shaken then there often ensues a
complete incapability of further resistance, and the whole action
consists of giving way, that is of flight.

Jena and Belle Alliance were routs, but not so Borodino.

Although without pedantry we can here give no single line of separation,
because the difference between the things is one of degrees, yet still
the retention of the conception is essential as a central point to give
clearness to our theoretical ideas and it is a want in our terminology
that for a victory over the enemy tantamount to a rout, and a conquest
of the enemy only tantamount to a simple victory, there is only one and
the same word to use.

CHAPTER V. ON THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE COMBAT

HAVING in the preceding chapter examined the combat in its absolute
form, as the miniature picture of the whole War, we now turn to the
relations which it bears to the other parts of the great whole. First we
inquire what is more precisely the signification of a combat.

As War is nothing else but a mutual process of destruction, then the
most natural answer in conception, and perhaps also in reality, appears
to be that all the powers of each party unite in one great volume and
all results in one great shock of these masses. There is certainly much
truth in this idea, and it seems to be very advisable that we should
adhere to it and should on that account look upon small combats at first
only as necessary loss, like the shavings from a carpenter's plane.
Still, however, the thing cannot be settled so easily.

That a multiplication of combats should arise from a fractioning of
forces is a matter of course, and the more immediate objects of separate
combats will therefore come before us in the subject of a fractioning
of forces; but these objects, and together with them, the whole mass of
combats may i