Besides, the enemy attacked in the very centre of his dominions will have no forces worth speaking of to employ in interrupting this connection; all that is to be apprehended is that this interruption may be attempted by a co-operation of the inhabitants with the partisans, so that this object does not actually cost the enemy any troops. To prevent that, it is sufficient to send a corps of 10,000 or 15,000 men, particularly strong in cavalry, in the direction from Trèves to Rheims. It will be able to drive every partisan before it, and keep in line with the grand army. This corps should neither invest nor watch fortresses, but march between them, depend on no fixed basis, but give way before superior forces in any direction, no great misfortune could happen to it, and if such did happen, it would again be no serious misfortune for the whole. Under these circumstances, such a corps might probably serve as an intermediate link between the two attacks.
4. The two subordinate undertakings, that is, the Austrian army in Italy, and the English army for landing on the coast, might follow their object as appeared best. If they do not remain idle, their mission is fulfilled as regards the chief point, and on no account should either of the two great attacks be made dependent in any way on these minor ones.
We are quite convinced that in this way France may be overthrown and chastised whenever it thinks fit to put on that insolent air with which it has oppressed Europe for a hundred and fifty years. It is only on the other side of Paris, on the Loire, that those conditions can be obtained from it which are necessary for the peace of Europe. In this way alone the natural relation between 30 millions of men and 75 millions will quickly make itself known, but not if the country from Dunkirk to Genoa is to be surrounded in the way it has been for 150 years by a girdle of armies, whilst fifty different small objects are aimed at, not one of which is powerful enough to overcome the inertia, friction, and extraneous influences which spring up and reproduce themselves everywhere, but more especially in allied armies.
How little the provisional organisation of the German federal armies is adapted to such a disposition, will strike the reader. By that organisation the federative part of Germany forms the nucleus of the German power, and Prussia and Austria thus weakened, lose their natural influence. But a federative state is a very brittle nucleus in war. There is in it no unity, no energy, no rational choice of a commander, no authority, no responsibility.
Austria and Prussia are the two natural centres of force of the German empire; they form the pivot (or fulcrum), the forte of the sword; they are monarchical states, used to war; they have well-defined interests, independence of power; they are predominant over the others. The organisation should follow these natural lineaments, and not a false notion about unity, which is an impossibility in such a case; and he who neglects the possible in quest of the impossible is a fool.