movements which
precede and prepare for great battles, or which, by their skilful and
energetic combinations, attain great ends without the actual contact
of arms, depend upon factors more permanent than the weapons of the
age, and therefore furnish principles of more enduring value.

In a war undertaken for any object, even if that object be the
possession of a particular territory or position, an attack directly
upon the place coveted may not be, from the military point of view,
the best means of obtaining it. The end upon which the military
operations are directed may therefore be other than the object which
the belligerent government wishes to obtain, and it has received a
name of its own,--the objective. In the critical consideration of any
war it is necessary, first, to put clearly before the student's eye
the objects desired by each belligerent; then, to consider whether the
objective chosen is the most likely, in case of success, to compass
those objects; and finally, to study the merits or faults of the
various movements by which the objective is approached. The minuteness
with which such an examination is conducted will depend upon the
extent of the work which the inquirer proposes to himself; but it will
generally conduce to clearness if an outline, giving only the main
features unencumbered by detail, should precede a more exhaustive
discussion. When such principal lines are thoroughly grasped, details
are easily referred to them, and fall into place. The effort here will
be confined to presenting such an outline, as being alone fitted to
the scope of this work.

The principal parties to the War of 1778 were, on the one hand, Great
Britain; on the other, the House of Bourbon, controlling the two great
kingdoms of France and Spain. The American colonies, being already
engaged in an unequal struggle with the mother-country, gladly
welcomed an event so important to them; while in 1780 Holland was
deliberately forced by England into a war from which she had nothing
to gain and all to lose. The object of the Americans was perfectly
simple,--to rid their country out of the hands of the English. Their
poverty and their lack of military sea power, with the exception of a
few cruisers that preyed upon the enemy's commerce, necessarily
confined their efforts to land warfare, which constituted indeed a
powerful diversion in favor of the allies and an exhausting drain upon
the resources of Great Britain, but which it