The Sword and the pen : selections from world's greatest military writings by Liddell Hart Basil Henry Sir 1895-1970;Liddell Hart Adrian & Liddell Hart Adrian

Author:Liddell Hart, Basil Henry, Sir, 1895-1970;Liddell Hart, Adrian & Liddell Hart, Adrian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military art and science, Military history, War
ISBN: 9780690000528
Publisher: New York : Crowell
Published: 1976-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

ANTOINE DE JOMINI:

FROM

Summary of the Art of War

Baron Antoine de Jomini was born in Switzerland in 1779 and, after working in a Paris bank, organized battalions in the Swiss army. His writings on tactics brought him fame and he was appointed aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney and a colonel by Napoleon. After accompanying Ney on the Jena and Eylau campaign and also to Spain, he resigned from the French service, but was recalled by Napoleon in 1810, at the age of twenty-eight, with the rank of general of brigade.

He became director of the historical section of the French general staff and then participated in the Russian campaign, acting as Ney's chief of staff. In 1813 he deserted, after largely winning the battle of Bautze but failing to receive promotion, and served as a lieutenant general in the Russian army for the rest of the war. He was present as aide-de-camp to the Emperor Alexander at the Battle of Leipzig.

He took part in the Congress of Vienna, became military tutor to the Russian Imperial family and accompanied his pupil, now the Emperor Nicholas I, on the Turkish campaign of 1828 with the rank of general in chief. He helped to found the Military Academy in Moscow in 1832. His most famous work, Precis de l'Art de la Guerre, was prepared for the Tsarevich Alexander and published in 1837. He retired in 1848, though he returned to advise the emperor during the Crimean War in 1854, and died in Paris in 1869.

One cannot deny to General Clausewitz great learning and a facile pen. But this pen, at times a little vagrant, is above all too pretentious for a didactic discussion, in which simplicity and clearness ought to come first. Besides that, the author shows himself by far too sceptical in point of military science; his first volume is but a declamation against all theory of war, whilst the two succeeding volumes, full of theoretic maxims, prove that the author believes in the efficacy of his own doctrines, if he does not believe in those of others. Of all theories on the art of war, the only

The Revolution

reasonable one is that which, founded upon the study of military history, admits a certain number of regulating principles but leaves to natural genius the greatest part of the general conduct of a war without tramelling it with exclusive rules.

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The love of conquest, however, was not the only motive with Napoleon: his personal position and his contest with England urged him to enterprises calculated to make him supreme. One might say his victories teach us what may be accomplished by activity, boldness and skill; his disasters, what might have been avoided by prudence.

* ★ *

As a soldier preferring loyal and chivalrous warfare to organized assassination if it be necessary to make a choice, I acknowledge that my prejudices are in favour of the good old times when the French and English Guards courteously invited each other to fire first—as at Fontenoy —preferring them to the

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