that which Napoleon habitually adopted, and yet we have it presented by
Jomini and Clausewitz, the two apostles of the Napoleonic method. The
explanation is, of course, that both of them had seen too much not to know
that Napoleon's method was only applicable when you could command a real
physical or moral preponderance. Given such a preponderance, both were
staunch for the use of extreme means in Napoleon's manner. It is not as
something better than the higher road that they commend the lower one, but
being veteran staff-officers and not mere theorists, they knew well that a
belligerent must sometimes find the higher road beyond his strength, or
beyond the effort which the spirit of the nation is prepared to make for
the end in view, and like the practical men they were, they set themselves
to study the potentialities of the lower road should hard necessity force
them to travel it. They found that these potentialities in certain
circumstances were great. As an example of a case where the lower form was
more appropriate Jomini cites Napoleon's campaign against Russia in 1812.
In his opinion it would have been better if Napoleon had been satisfied to
begin on the lower method with a limited territorial object, and he
attributes his failure to the abuse of a method which, however well suited
to his wars in Germany, was incapable of achieving success in the
conditions presented by a war with Russia.

Seeing how high was Napoleon's opinion of Jomini as a master of the science
of war, it is curious how his views on the two natures of wars have been
ignored in the present day. It is even more curious in the case of
Clausewitz, since we know that in the plenitude of his powers he came to
regard this classification as the master-key of the subject. The
explanation is that the distinction is not very clearly formulated in his
first seven books, which alone he left in anything like a finished
condition. It was not till he came to write his eighth book _On War Plans_
that he saw the vital importance of the distinction round which he had been