[4] Ibid, p. viii

That hope was never realised, and that perhaps is why his penetrating analysis has been so much ignored.  The eighth book as we have it is only a fragment.  In the spring of 1830—­an anxious moment, when it seemed that Prussia would require all her best for another struggle single-handed with France—­he was called away to an active command.  What he left of the book on “War Plans” he describes as “merely a track roughly cleared, as it were, through the mass, in order to ascertain the points of greatest moment.”  It was his intention, he says, to “carry the spirit of these ideas into his first six books”—­to put the crown on his work, in fact, by elaborating and insisting upon his two great propositions, viz. that war was a form of policy, and that being so it might be Limited or Unlimited.

The extent to which he would have infused his new idea into the whole every one is at liberty to judge for himself; but this indisputable fact remains.  In the winter in view of the threatening attitude of France in regard to Belgium he drew up a war plan, and it was designed not on the Napoleonic method of making the enemy’s armed force the main strategical objective, but on seizing a limited territorial object and forcing a disadvantageous counter-offensive upon the French.  The revolutionary movement throughout Europe had broken the Holy Alliance to pieces.  Not only did Prussia find herself almost single-handed against France, but she herself was sapped by revolution.  To adopt the higher form of war and seek to destroy the armed force of the enemy was beyond her power.  But she could still use the lower form, and by seizing Belgium she could herself force so exhausting a task on France that success was well within her strength.  It was exactly so we endeavoured to begin the Seven Years’ War; and it was exactly so the Japanese successfully conducted their war with Russia; and what is more striking, it was on similar lines that in 1859 Moltke in similar circumstances drew up his first war plan against France.  His idea at that time was on the lines which Jomini held should have been Napoleon’s in 1812.  It was not to strike directly at Paris or the French main army, but to occupy Alsace-Lorraine and hold that territory till altered conditions should give him the necessary preponderance for proceeding to the higher form or forcing a favourable peace.

In conclusion, then, we have to note that the matured fruit of the Napoleonic period was a theory of war based not on the single absolute idea, but on the dual distinction of Limited and Unlimited.  Whatever practical importance we may attach to the distinction, so much must be admitted on the clear and emphatic pronouncements of Clausewitz and Jomini.  The practical importance is another matter.  It may fairly be argued that in continental warfare—­in spite of the instances quoted by both the classical writers—­it is not very great, for reasons that will appear directly.  But it must be remembered that continental warfare is not the only form in which great international issues are decided.  Standing at the final point which Clausewitz and Jomini reached, we are indeed only on the threshold of the subject.  We have to begin where they left off and inquire what their ideas have to tell for the modern conditions of worldwide imperial States, where the sea becomes a direct and vital factor.