THE ORIGINS OF THE FALSE OBJECTIVE
How arose this “blinkered” conception that the national goal in war could be attained only by mass destruction, and how did it gain so firm a hold on military thought? The decisive influence was exerted not by Napoleon himself, though his practical example of the beneficent results of “absolute war” was its inspiration, but by his great German expositor, Carl von Clausewitz. He it was who, in the years succeeding Waterloo, analysed, codified, and deified the Napoleonic method.
Clausewitz has been the master at whose feet have sat for a century the military students of Europe. From him, the German Army in particular drew the inspiration by which they evolved their stupendous, if fundamentally unsound, structure of “the nation in arms.” It achieved its triumph in 1870 and, as a result, all the Powers hurried to imitate the model, and to revive with ever greater intensity the Napoleonic tradition, until finally the gigantic edifice was put to an extended test in the years 1914–1918—with the result that in its fall it has brought low not only Germany, but, with it, the rest of Europe.
Thus, because of the unsoundness of their foundations, Clausewitz’s theories have ended by bringing his Fatherland into a more impotent and impoverished state even than when it was under the iron heel of Napoleon. Clausewitz’s was truly “a house built on sand.”
Yet, despite his main miscalculations, he had a wider understanding of the objects of war than most of his disciples. Clausewitz did at least recognize the existence of other objectives besides the armed forces. He enumerated three general objects—the military power, the country, and the will of the enemy. But his vital mistake was to place “the will” last in his list, instead of first and embracing all the others, and to maintain that the destruction of the enemy’s main armies was the best way to ensure the remaining objects. Similarly, the other most famous military teacher of the century before the Great War, Marshal Foch, admitted the existence and wisdom, under certain conditions, of other means, but, as with Clausewitz, the reservations were forgotten, and his disciples remembered only his assertion that “the true theory” of war was “that of the absolute war which Napoleon had taught Europe.”
This was but human nature, for the followers of any great teacher demand a single watchword, however narrow. The idea of preserving a broad and balanced point of view is anathema to the mass, who crave for a slogan and detest the complexities of independent thought. It is not surprising that military thought in recent generations, in its blind worship of the idol of “absolute war,” has poured scorn on the objectives of Napoleon’s predecessors—curiously forgetting that they at least gained the purpose of their policy, whereas his ended in ruin. One and all spoke and wrote with contempt of these eighteenth-century strategists, though they included such men as Marshal Saxe, whose writings bear the impress of a mind perhaps more original and unbiased by traditional prejudices than any in military history.
Here is how Foch, in his Principes de Guerre, contrasts the exponents of the rival theories: “Marshal de Saxe, albeit a man of undeniable ability, said: ‘I am not in favour of giving battle.... I am even convinced that a clever general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so.’ Entering Saxony in 1806, Napoleon writes to Marshal Soult: ‘There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle.’ The one wants to avoid battle his whole life; the other demands it at the first opportunity.”
So that even a man of the intellectual calibre of Marshal Foch thinks solely of the tangible proofs of military victory, with never a reflection as to which of these two men best fulfilled ultimately the national objective of an honourable, secure, and prosperous future.
We see him greeting with approval the dictum of Clausewitz: “Blood is the price of victory. You must either resort to it or give up waging war. All reasons of humanity which you might advance will only expose you to being beaten by a less sentimental adversary.”