of strategic combination, and that good troops, if well cared for, could be made to march twenty-five miles daily, and win battles besides.”  And he had learned more than this.  “We must make this campaign,” he said at the beginning of 1868, “an exceedingly active one.  Only thus can a weaker country cope with a stronger; it must make up in activity what it lacks in strength.  A defensive campaign can only be made successful by taking the aggressive at the proper time.  Napoleon never waited for his adversary to become fully prepared, but struck him the first blow."”

It would perhaps be difficult, in the writings of Napoleon, to find a passage which embodies his conception of war in terms as definite as these; but no words could convey it more clearly.  It is sometimes forgotten that Napoleon was often outnumbered at the outset of a campaign.  It was not only in the campaigns of Italy, of Leipsic, of 1814, and of Waterloo, that the hostile armies were larger than his own.  In those of Ulm, Austerlitz, Eckmuhl, and Dresden, he was numerically inferior on the whole theatre of war; but while the French troops were concentrated under a single chief, the armies of the Allies were scattered over a wide area, and unable to support each other.  Before they could come together, Napoleon, moving with the utmost rapidity, struck the first blow, and they were defeated in succession.  The first principle of war is to concentrate superior force at the decisive point, that is, upon the field of battle.  But it is exceedingly seldom that by standing still, and leaving the initiative to the enemy, that this principle can be observed, for a numerically inferior force, if it once permits its enemy to concentrate, can hardly hope for success.  True generalship is, therefore, “to make up in activity for lack of strength; to strike the enemy in detail, and overthrow his columns in succession.  And the highest art of all is to compel him to disperse his army, and then to concentrate superior force against each fraction in turn.”

It is such strategy as this that “gains the ends of States and makes men heroes.”  Napoleon did not discover it.  Every single general who deserves to be entitled great has used it.  Frederick, threatened by Austria, France, Russia, Saxony, and Sweden, used it in self-defence, and from the Seven Years’ War the little kingdom of Prussia emerged as a first-class Power.  It was such strategy which won back the Peninsula; not the lines of Torres Vedras, but the bold march northwards to Vittoria.* (* “In six weeks, Wellington marched with 100,000 men six hundred miles, passed six great rivers, gained one decisive battle, invested two fortresses, and drove 120,000 veteran troops from Spain.”  The War in the Peninsula, Napier volume 5 page 132.) It was on the same lines that Lee and Jackson acted.  Lee, in compelling the Federals to keep their columns separated, manoeuvred with a skill which has seldom been surpassed; Jackson, falling as it were from the skies into the midst of his astonished foes, struck right and left before they could combine, and defeated in detail every detachment which crossed his path.