The Art of War

by baron de Antoine Henri Jomini

1. Considering the difficulty of finding ground and time necessary to bring a very large force into action on the day of battle, an army of one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty thousand men may easily resist a much larger force.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.[^[19]]

On the other hand, concentric operations are good in two cases: 1. When they tend to concentrate a scattered army upon a point where it will be sure to arrive before the enemy; 2. When they direct to the same end the efforts of two armies which are in no danger of being beaten separately by a stronger enemy.

Concentric operations, which just now seem to be so advantageous, may be most pernicious,—which should teach us the necessity of detecting the principles upon which systems are based, and not to confound principles and systems; as, for instance, if two armies set out from a distant base to march convergently upon an enemy whose forces are on interior lines and more concentrated, it follows that the latter could effect a union before the former, and would inevitably defeat them; as was the case with Moreau and Jourdan in 1796, opposed to the Archduke Charles.

In starting from the same points, or from two points much less separated than Dusseldorf and Strasbourg, an army may be exposed to this danger. What was the fate of the concentric columns of Wurmser and Quasdanovitch, wishing to reach the Mincio by the two banks of Lake Garda? Can the result of the march of Napoleon and Grouchy on Brussels be forgotten? Leaving Sombref, they were to march concentrically on this city,—one by Quatre-Bras, the other by Wavre. Blücher and Wellington, taking an interior strategic line, effected a junction before them, and the terrible disaster of Waterloo proved to the world that the immutable principles of war cannot be violated with impunity.

Such events prove better than any arguments that a system which is not in accordance with the principles of war cannot be good. I lay no claim to the creation of these principles, for they have always existed, and were applied by Cæsar, Scipio, and the Consul Nero, as well as by Marlborough and Eugene; but I claim to have been the first to point them out, and to lay down the principal chances in their various applications.