consisting of several detached posts, to the cordon system, there is still certainly a considerable step, but it is one which generals, nevertheless, often take without being aware of it, being drawn on from one step to another. First, the covering and the possession of the country is the object of the dispersion; afterwards it is the security of the army itself. Every commander of a post calculates the advantage which may be derived from this or that point connected with the approach to his position on the right or the left, and thus the whole progresses insensibly from one degree of subdivision to another.
A cordon war, therefore, carried on by the principal force of an army, is not to be considered a form of war designedly chosen with a view to stopping every blow which the enemy’s forces might attempt, but a situation which the army is drawn into in the pursuit of a very different object, namely, the holding and covering the country against an enemy who has no decisive undertaking in view. Such a situation must always be looked upon as a mistake; and the motives through which generals have been lured by degrees into allowing one small post after another, are contemptible in connection with the object of a large army; this point of view shows, at all events, the possibility of such a mistake. That it is really an error, namely, a mistaken appreciation of our own position, and that of the enemy is sometimes not observed, and it is spoken of as an erroneous system . But this same system, when it is pursued with advantage, or, at all events, without causing damage, is quietly approved. Every one praises the faultless campaigns of Prince Henry in the Seven Years’ War, because they have been pronounced so by the king, although these campaigns exhibit the most decided and most incomprehensible examples of chains of posts so extended that they may just with as much propriety be called cordons as any that ever were. We may completely justify these positions by saying, the prince knew his opponent; he knew that he had no enterprises of a decisive character to apprehend from that quarter, and as the object of his position besides was to occupy always as much territory as possible, he therefore carried out that object as far as