of the enemy from concentrating or from
affording each other mutual support.

5. In combining, in the same spirit of centralization, all strategic
positions, and all large detachments made to cover the most important
strategic points of the theater of war.

6. In imparting to the troops the greatest possible mobility and
activity, so as, by their successive employment upon points where it may
be important to act, to bring superior force to bear upon fractions of
the hostile army.

The system of rapid and continuous marches multiplies the effect of an
army, and at the same time neutralizes a great part of that of the
enemy's, and is often sufficient to insure success; but its effect will
be quintupled if the marches be skillfully directed upon the decisive
strategic points of the zone of operations, where the severest blows to
the enemy can be given.

However, as a general may not always be prepared to adopt this decisive
course to the exclusion of every other, he must then be content with
attaining a part of the object of every enterprise, by rapid and
successive employment of his forces upon isolated bodies of the enemy,
thus insuring their defeat. A general who moves his masses rapidly and
continually, and gives them proper directions, may be confident both of
gaining victories and of securing great results therefrom.

The oft-cited operations of 1809 and 1814 prove these truths most
satisfactorily, as also does that ordered by Carnot in 1793, already
mentioned in Article XXIV., and the details of which may be found in
Volume IV. of my History of the Wars of the Revolution. Forty
battalions, carried successively from Dunkirk to Menin, Maubeuge, and
Landau, by reinforcing the armies already at those points, gained four
victories and saved France. The whole science of marches would have been
found in this wise operation had it been directed upon the decisive
strategic point. The Austrian was then the principal army of the
Coalition, and its line of retreat was upon Cologne: hence it was upon
the Meuse that a general effort of the French would have inflicted the
most severe blow. The Committee of Public Safety provided for the most
pressing danger, and the maneuver contains half of the strategic
principle; the other half consists in giving to such efforts the most
decisive direction, as Napoleon did at Ulm, at Jena, and at Ratisbon.
The whole of strategy is contained in these four examples.

It is superfluous to a