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.

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