_merely to make some conquests on the frontiers of his country_, either for
the purpose of retaining them permanently or of turning them to account as
a matter of exchange in settling terms of peace."[3] It was in his eighth
book that he intended, had he lived, to have worked out the comprehensive
idea he had conceived. Of that book he says, "The chief object will be to
make good the two points of view above mentioned, by which everything will
be simplified and at the same time be given the breath of life. I hope in
this book to iron out many creases in the heads of strategists and
statesmen, and at least to show the object of action and the real point to
be considered in war."[4]

[3] Ibid, Preparatory 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