reduce with little more difficulty than they had met with ten years before
against the Chinese. Such at least was the actual progression of events,
and a criticism which regards operations of such magnitude and ultimate
importance as mere incidents of strategic deployment is only to be
explained by the domination of the Napoleonic idea of war, against the
universal application of which Clausewitz so solemnly protested. It is the
work of men who have a natural difficulty in conceiving a war plan that
does not culminate in a Jena or a Sedan. It is a view surely which is the
child of theory, bearing no relation to the actuality of the war in
question and affording no explanation of its ultimate success. The truth
is, that so long as the Japanese acted on the principles of limited war, as
laid down by Clausewitz and Jomini and plainly deducible from our own rich
experience, they progressed beyond all their expectations, but so soon as
they departed from them and suffered themselves to be confused with
continental theories they were surprised by unaccountable failure.

The expression "Limited war" is no doubt not entirely happy. Yet no other
has been found to condense the ideas of limited object and limited
interest, which are its special characteristics. Still if the above example
be kept in mind as a typical case, the meaning of the term will not be
mistaken. It only remains to emphasise one important point. The fact that
the doctrine of limited war traverses the current belief that our primary
objective must always be the enemy's armed forces is liable to carry with
it a false inference that it also rejects the corollary that war means the
use of battles. Nothing is further from the conception. Whatever the form
of war, there is no likelihood of our ever going back to the old fallacy of
attempting to decide wars by manoeuvres. All forms alike demand the use of
battles. By our fundamental theory war is always "a continuation of
political intercourse, in which fighting is substituted for writing notes."
However great the controlling influence of the political object, it must