- Lastly, there is still a fourth ground for a separate advance in the facility which it may afford for subsistence.
It is certainly much pleasanter to march with a small army through an opulent country, than with a large army through a poor one; but by suitable measures, and with an army accustomed to privations, the latter is not impossible, and, therefore, the first should never have such an influence on our plans as to lead us into a great danger.
We have now done justice to the grounds for a separation of forces which divides the chief operation into several, and if the separation takes place on any of these grounds, with a distinct conception of the object, and after due consideration of the advantages and disadvantages, we shall not venture to find fault.
But if, as usually happens, a plan is drawn out by a learned general staff, merely according to routine; if different theatres of war, like the squares on a chess board, must each have its piece first placed on it before the moves begin, if these moves approach the aim in complicated lines and relations by dint of an imaginary profundity in the art of combination, if the armies are to separate to-day in order to apply all their skill in reuniting at the greatest risk in fourteen days then we have a perfect horror of this abandonment of the direct simple common-sense road to rush intentionally into absolute confusion. This folly happens more easily the less the general-in-chief directs the war, and conducts it in the sense which we have pointed out in the first chapter as an act of his individuality invested with extraordinary powers; the more, therefore, the whole plan is manufactured by an inexperienced staff, and from the ideas of a dozen smatterers.
We have still now to consider the third part of our first principle; that is, to keep the subordinate parts as much as possible in subordination.