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nts, for temporary and important objects, like those mentioned, are perfectly legitimate, and in accordance with correct principles. Napoleon's position in Spain will serve as an illustration. A hand, placed on the map of that country, will represent the position of the invading forces. When opened, the fingers will represent the several detachments, thrown out on important strategic lines, and which could readily be drawn in, as in closing the hand, upon the principal and central mass, preparatory to striking some important blow. "If, as we have seen, it be the first great rule for an army acting on the offensive principle, to keep its forces _concentrated_, it is, no doubt, the second, _to keep them fully employed._ Is it your intention to seize a particular province of your enemy? to penetrate to his capital? or to cut him off from his supplies? Whatever measure be necessary to open your route to these objects must be _promptly_ taken; and if you mean to subsist yourself at his expense, your movements must be more rapid than his. Give him time to _breathe_,--and above all, give him time to _rest_, and your project is blasted; his forages will be completed, and his magazines filled and secured. The roads of approach will be obstructed, bridges destroyed, and strong points everywhere taken and defended. You will, in fact, like Burgoyne, in 1777, reduce yourself to the necessity of bleeding at every step, without equivalent or use." "Such cannot be the fate of a commander who, knowing all the value of acting on the offensive, shakes, by the vigor and address of his first movements, the moral as well as physical force of his enemy,--who, selecting his own time, and place, and mode of attack, confounds his antagonist by enterprises equally hardy and unexpected,--and who at last leaves to him only the alternative of resistance without hope, or of flying without resistance." The British army, in the war of the American Revolution, must have been most wretchedly ignorant of these leading maxims for conducting offensive war. Instead of concentrating their forces on some decisive point, and then destroying the main body of our army by repeated and well-directed blows, they scattered their forces over an immense extent of country, and became too weak to act with decision and effect on any one point. On the other hand, this policy enabled us to call out and discipline our scattered and ill-provided forces. The main obje
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