- If driven from the field, there will be at least one hundred thousand men to protect and insure an orderly retreat and effect a junction with one of the other armies.
- The central army of four hundred thousand men requires such a quantity of provisions, munitions, horses, and matériel of every kind, that it will possess less mobility and facility in shifting its efforts from one part of the zone to another; to say nothing of the impossibility of obtaining provisions from a region too restricted to support such numbers.
- The bodies of observation detached from the central mass to hold in check two armies of one hundred and thirty-five thousand each must be very strong, (from eighty to ninety thousand each;) and, being of such magnitude, if they are drawn into a serious engagement they will probably suffer reverses, the effects of which might outweigh the advantages gained by the principal army.
I have never advocated exclusively either a concentric or eccentric system. All my works go to show the eternal influence of principles, and to demonstrate that operations to be successful must be applications of principles.
Divergent or convergent operations may be either very good or very bad: all depends on the situation of the respective forces. The eccentric lines, for instance, are good when applied to a mass starting from a given point, and acting in divergent directions to divide and separately destroy two hostile forces acting upon exterior lines. Such was the maneuver of Frederick which brought about, at the end of the campaign of 1767, the fine battles of Rossbach and Leuthen. Such were nearly all the operations of Napoleon, whose favorite maneuver was to unite, by closely-calculated marches, imposing masses on the center, and, having pierced the enemy's center or turned his front, to give them eccentric directions to disperse the defeated army.9