principle he had framed. Had he lived, there is little doubt he would have
worked it out to its logical conclusion, but his death condemned his theory
of limited war to remain in the inchoate condition in which he had left it.

It will be observed, as was natural enough, that all through his work
Clausewitz had in his mind war between two contiguous or at least adjacent
continental States, and a moment's consideration will show that in that
type of war the principle of the limited object can rarely if ever assert
itself in perfect precision. Clausewitz himself put it quite clearly.
Assuming a case where "the overthrow of the enemy"--that is, unlimited
war--is beyond our strength, he points out that we need not therefore
necessarily act on the defensive. Our action may still be positive and
offensive, but the object can be nothing more than "the conquest of part of
the enemy's country." Such a conquest he knew might so far weaken your
enemy or strengthen your own position as to enable you to secure a
satisfactory peace. The path of history is indeed strewn with such cases.
But he was careful to point out that such a form of war was open to the
gravest objections. Once you had occupied the territory you aimed at, your
offensive action was, as a rule, arrested. A defensive attitude had to be
assumed, and such an arrest of offensive action he had previously shown was
inherently vicious, if only for moral reasons. Added to this you might find
that in your effort to occupy the territorial object you had so
irretrievably separated your striking force from your home-defence force as
to be in no position to meet your enemy if he was able to retort by acting
on unlimited lines with a stroke at your heart. A case in point was the
Austerlitz campaign, where Austria's object was to wrest North Italy from
Napoleon's empire. She sent her main army under the Archduke Charles to
seize the territory she desired. Napoleon immediately struck at Vienna,
destroyed her home army, and occupied the capital before the Archduke could
turn to bar his way.