This misfortune, which was to cost the Japanese so dear, may perhaps be attributed at least in part to the continental influences under which their army had been trained.  We at least can trace the unlimited outlook in the pages of the German Staff history.  In dealing with the Japanese plan of operations it is assumed that the occupation of Korea and the isolation of Port Arthur were but preliminaries to a concentric advance on Liao-yang, “which was kept in view as the first objective of the operations on land.”  But surely on every theory of the war the first objective of the Japanese on land was Seoul, where they expected to have to fight their first important action against troops advancing from the Yalu; and surely their second was Port Arthur, with its fleet and arsenal, which they expected to reduce with little more difficulty than they had met with ten years before against the Chinese.  Such at least was the actual progression of events, and a criticism which regards operations of such magnitude and ultimate importance as mere incidents of strategic deployment is only to be explained by the domination of the Napoleonic idea of war, against the universal application of which Clausewitz so solemnly protested.  It is the work of men who have a natural difficulty in conceiving a war plan that does not culminate in a Jena or a Sedan.  It is a view surely which is the child of theory, bearing no relation to the actuality of the war in question and affording no explanation of its ultimate success.  The truth is, that so long as the Japanese acted on the principles of limited war, as laid down by Clausewitz and Jomini and plainly deducible from our own rich experience, they progressed beyond all their expectations, but so soon as they departed from them and suffered themselves to be confused with continental theories they were surprised by unaccountable failure.

The expression “Limited war” is no doubt not entirely happy.  Yet no other has been found to condense the ideas of limited object and limited interest, which are its special characteristics.  Still if the above example be kept in mind as a typical case, the meaning of the term will not be mistaken.  It only remains to emphasise one important point.  The fact that the doctrine of limited war traverses the current belief that our primary objective must always be the enemy’s armed forces is liable to carry with it a false inference that it also rejects the corollary that war means the use of battles.  Nothing is further from the conception.  Whatever the form of war, there is no likelihood of our ever going back to the old fallacy of attempting to decide wars by manoeuvres.  All forms alike demand the use of battles.  By our fundamental theory war is always “a continuation of political intercourse, in which fighting is substituted for writing notes.”  However great the controlling influence of the political object, it must never obscure the fact that it is by fighting we have to gain our end.