y Notice, p. vii.

[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 matur