The Prince by Nicolo Macchiavelli
CHAPTER X
CONCERNING THE WAY IN WHICH THE STRENGTH OF ALL PRINCIPALITIES
OUGHT TO BE MEASURED
It is necessary to consider another point in examining the character of these principalities: that is,
whether a prince has such power that, in case of need, he can support himself with his own
resources, or whether he has always need of the assistance of others. And to make this quite clear I
say that I consider those who are able to support themselves by their own resources who can, either
by abundance of men or money, raise a sufficient army to join battle against any one who comes to
attack them; and I consider those always to have need of others who cannot show themselves
against the enemy in the field, but are forced to defend themselves by sheltering behind walls. The
first case has been discussed, but we will speak of it again should it recur. In the second case one can
say nothing except to encourage such princes to provision and fortify their towns, and not on any
account to defend the country. And whoever shall fortify his town well, and shall have managed the
other concerns of his subjects in the way stated above, and to be often repeated, will never be
attacked without great caution, for men are always adverse to enterprises where difficulties can be
seen, and it will be seen not to be an easy thing to attack one who has his town well fortified, and is
not hated by his people.
The cities of Germany are absolutely free, they own but little country around them, and they yield
obedience to the emperor when it suits them, nor do they fear this or any other power they may have
near them, because they are fortified in such a way that every one thinks the taking of them by
assault would be tedious and difficult, seeing they have proper ditches and walls, they have sufficient
artillery, and they always keep in public depots enough for one year's eating, drinking, and firing.
And beyond this, to keep the people quiet and without loss to the state, they always have the means
of giving work to the community in those labours that are the life and strength of the city, and on the
pursuit of which the people are supported; they also hold military exercises in repute, and moreover
have many ordinances to uphold them.
Therefore, a prince who has a strong city, and had not made himself odious, will not be attacked, or
if any one should attack he will only be driven off with disgrace; again, because that the affairs of
this world are so changeable, it is almost impossible to keep an army a whole year in the field
without being interfered with. And whoever should reply: If the people have property outside the
city, and see it burnt, they will not remain patient, and the long siege and self- interest will make
them forget their prince; to this I answer that a powerful and courageous prince will overcome all
such difficulties by giving at one time hope to his subjects that the evil will not be for long, at another
time fear of the cruelty of the enemy, then preserving himself adroitly from those subjects who seem
to him to be too bold.
Further, the enemy would naturally on his arrival at once burn and ruin the country at the time
when the spirits of the people are still hot and ready for the defence; and, therefore, so much the less
ought the prince to hesitate; because after a time, when spirits have cooled, the damage is already
done, the ills are incurred, and there is no longer any remedy; and therefore they are so much the
more ready to unite with their prince, he appearing to be under obligations to them now that their
houses have been burnt and their possessions ruined in his defence. For it is the nature of men to be
bound by the benefits they confer as much as by those they receive. Therefore, if everything is well
considered, it will not be difficult for a wise prince to keep the minds of his citizens steadfast from
first to last, when he does not fail to support and defend them.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
II. WAGING WAR
1. Sun Tzu said: In the operations of war, where there are in the field a thousand swift chariots,
as many heavy chariots, and a hundred thousand mail-clad soldiers, with provisions enough
to carry them a thousand li, the expenditure at home and at the front, including
entertainment of guests, small items such as glue and paint, and sums spent on chariots and
armor, will reach the total of a thousand ounces of silver per day. Such is the cost of raising
an army of 100,000 men.
2. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will
grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your
strength.
3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the
strain.
4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your
treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no
man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen
associated with long delays.
6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
7. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly
understand the profitable way of carrying it on.
8. The skillful soldier does not raise a second levy, neither are his supply-wagons loaded more
than twice.
9. Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy. Thus the army will have
food enough for its needs.
10. Poverty of the State exchequer causes an army to be maintained by contributions from a
distance. Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be
impoverished.
11. On the other hand, the proximity of an army causes prices to go up; and high prices cause
the people's substance to be drained away.
12. When their substance is drained away, the peasantry will be afflicted by heavy exactions.
13. & 14. With this loss of substance and exhaustion of strength, the homes of the people will be
stripped bare, and three-tenths of their income will be dissipated; while government expenses
for broken chariots, worn-out horses, breast-plates and helmets, bows and arrows, spears and
shields, protective mantles, draught-oxen and heavy wagons, will amount to four-tenths of
its total revenue.
15. Hence a wise general makes a point of foraging on the enemy. One cartload of the enemy's
provisions is equivalent to twenty of one's own, and likewise a single picul of his provender
is equivalent to twenty from one's own store.
16. Now in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger; that there may be
advantage from defeating the enemy, they must have their rewards.
17. Therefore in chariot fighting, when ten or more chariots have been taken, those should be
rewarded who took the first. Our own flags should be substituted for those of the enemy, and
the chariots mingled and used in conjunction with ours. The captured soldiers should be
kindly treated and kept.
18. This is called, using the conquered foe to augment one's own strength.
19. In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.
20. Thus it may be known that the leader of armies is the arbiter of the people's fate, the man on
whom it depends whether the nation shall be in peace or in peril.
ON WAR by Carl von Clausewitz
BOOK 4: Chapter 10 The BATTLE
And now as to the effect of the victory, out of the army, upon the nation and government! It is the
sudden collapse of hopes stretched to the utmost, the downfall of all self-reliance. In place of these
extinct forces, fear, with its destructive properties of expansion, rushes into the vacuum left, and
completes the prostration. It is a real shock upon the nerves, which one of the two athletes receives by
the electric spark of victory. And that effect, however different in its degrees here and there, is never
completely wanting. Instead of every one hastening with a spirit of determination to aid in repairing
the disaster, every one fears that his efforts will only be in vain, and stops, hesitating with himself,
when he should rush forward; or in despondency he lets his arm drop, leaving everything to fate.
The consequences which this effect of victory brings forth in the course of the war itself depend in
part on the character and talent of the victorious general, but more on the circumstances from which
the victory proceeds, and to which it leads. Without boldness and an enterprising spirit on the part of
the general, the most brilliant victory will lead to no great success, and its force exhausts itself all the
sooner on circumstances, if these offer a strong and stubborn opposition to it. How very differently
from Daun, Frederick the Great would have used the victory at Collin; and what different
consequences France, in place of Prussia, might have given a battle of Leuthen!
The conditions which allow us to expect great results from a great victory we shall learn when we
come to the subjects with which they are connected; then it will be possible to explain the disproportion
which appears at first sight between the magnitude of a victory and its results, and which is only too
readily attributed to a want of energy on the part of the conqueror. Here, where we have to do with
the great battle in itself, we shall merely say that the effects now depicted never fail to attend a victory,
that they mount up with the intensive strength of the victory—mount up more the more the battle is a
general action, that is the more the whole strength of the army has been concentrated in it, the more
the whole military power of the nation is contained in that army, and the state in that military power.
But then the question may be asked, Can theory accept this effect of victory as absolutely
necessary?—must it not rather endeavour to find out counter-acting means capable of neutralising
these effects? It seems quite natural to answer this question in the affirmative; but heaven defend us
from taking that wrong course of most theories, out of which is begotten a mutually devouring Pro et
Contra.
Certainly that effect is perfectly necessary, for it has its foundation in the nature of things, and it
exists, even if we find means to struggle against it; just as the motion of a cannon ball is always in the
direction of the terrestrial, although when fired from east to west part of the general velocity is
destroyed by this opposite motion.
All war supposes human weakness, and against that it is directed.
Therefore, if hereafter in another place we examine what is to be done after the loss of a great battle,
if we bring under review the resources which still remain, even in the most desperate cases, if we
should express a belief in the possibility of retrieving all, even in such a case; it must not be supposed
we mean thereby that the effects of such a defeat can by degrees be completely wiped out, for the forces
and means used to repair the disaster might have been applied to the realisation of some positive object;
and this applies both to the moral and physical forces.
Another question is, whether, through the loss of a great battle, forces are not perhaps roused into
existence, which otherwise would never have come to life. This case is certainly conceivable, and it is
what has actually occurred with many nations. But to produce this intensified reaction is beyond the
province of military art, which can only take account of it where it might be assumed as a possibility.
If there are cases in which the fruits of a victory appear rather of a destructive nature in consequence
of the reaction of the forces which it had the effect of rousing into activity—cases which certainly are
very exceptional—then it must the more surely be granted, that there is a difference in the effects which
one and the same victory may produce according to the character of the people or state, which has
been conquered.
Losing the War by Lee Sandlin
People my age and younger who've grown up in the American heartland can't help but take for
granted that war is unnatural. We think of the limitless peace around us as the baseline condition of
life. War, any war, is for us a contemptible death trip, a relic of lizard-brain machismo, a toxic byproduct of America's capitalist military system -- one more covert and dishonorable crime we
commit in the third world. All my life I've heard people say "war is insanity" in tones of dramatic
insight and final wisdom, and it took me a long time to realize that what they really meant was "war
is an activity I don't want to understand, done by people I fear and despise."
But there've been places and times where people have thought of war as the given and peace the
perversion. The Greeks of Homer's time, for instance, saw war as the one enduring constant
underlying the petty affairs of humanity, as routine and all-consuming as the cycle of the seasons:
grim and squalid in many ways, but still the essential time when the motives and powers of the gods
are most manifest. To the Greeks, peace was nothing but a fluke, an irrelevance, an arbitrary delay
brought on when bad weather forced the spring campaign to be canceled, or a back-room deal kept
the troops at home until after harvest time. Any of Homer's heroes would see the peaceful life of the
average American as some bizarre aberration, like a garden mysteriously cultivated for decades on
the slopes of an avalanche-haunted mountain.
In our own culture the people who know what war is like find it almost impossible to
communicate with the children of peace. In the last election Bob Dole was defeated in large part
because of World War II -- what he thought it meant, and what he didn't see it meant to people of a
later generation. To Dole, World War II was a teacher of positive values: courage, self-sacrifice,
respect for authority, dedication to a common goal -- values he thought were signally absent in the
soft and cynical selfishness of Clinton's generation. But it was just that cynicism that Dole couldn't
crack. Everybody knew that if those values had ever really existed in America, they were only the
result of some Norman Rockwell collective delusion. We're smarter now -- smart enough to see
through war, anyway. We think it's a sick joke to suggest that war could ever teach anybody anything
good.
[…]
Is it that the war was 50 years ago and nobody cares anymore what happened before this week?
Maybe so, but I think what my little survey really demonstrates is how vast the gap is between the
experience of war and the experience of peace. One of the persistent themes in the best writing
about the war -- I'm thinking particularly of Paul Fussell's brilliant polemic Wartime: Understanding
and Behavior in the Second World War -- is that nobody back home has ever known much about
what it was like on the battlefield. From the beginning, the actual circumstances of World War II
were smothered in countless lies, evasions, and distortions, like a wrecked landscape smoothed by a
blizzard. People all along have preferred the movie version: the tense border crossing where the
flint-eyed SS guards check the forged papers; the despondent high-level briefing where the junior
staff officer pipes up with the crazy plan that just might work; the cheerful POWs running rings
around the Nazi commandant; the soldier dying gently in a sunlit jungle glade, surrounded by a
platoon of teary-eyed buddies. The truth behind these cliches was never forgotten -- because nobody
except the soldiers ever learned it in the first place.
I think my own childhood image was typical. For me, the war was essentially a metaphysical
struggle: America versus the Nazis, all over the world and throughout time. I couldn't have told you
anything about its real circumstances; those didn't interest me. The historical war was just a lot of
silent newsreel footage of soldiers trudging, artillery pumping, buildings collapsing, and boats
bumping ashore -- fodder for dull school movies and the duller TV documentaries I was reduced to
watching on weekend afternoons when our neighborhood campaigns were rained out. My war was a
dreamy, gliding epic, a golden tidal wave of eternally cresting triumph: it was filled with Nazi spy
satellites and commando missions behind enemy lines to blow up the gestapo's new hydroelectric
dam; Hitler had a supercomputer, and SS headquarters was a ziggurat looming in my nightmares like
the wicked witch's castle in The Wizard of Oz. Real battles like the Coral Sea made it into my
reveries only for their poetic value: I thought they were as alluring and turbulent as the oceans of the
moon. I think I was an adult before I fully grasped that Guadalcanal wasn't a battle over a canal; I'd
always fondly pictured furious soldiers fighting over immense locks and reservoirs somewhere where
they had canals -- Holland maybe, or Panama.
Granted, children always get the child's version of war. But the child's version is the only one
readily available. It's no problem of course, if you have sufficient archaeological patience, to root out
a more complicated form of historical truth; bookstores offer everything from thumpingly vast
general surveys to war-gaming tactical analyses of diversionary skirmishes to maniacally detailed
collector's encyclopedias about tank treads. The best academic histories -- such as Gerhard L.
Weinberg's extraordinary A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II -- document and
analyze in depth aspects of the war that even the most fanatical buff may not have heard of before:
the campaigns along the Indian border, for instance, or the diplomatic maneuvering about Turkish
neutrality. But reading almost all of them, one has the sense that some essential truth is still not
being disclosed. It's as though the experience of war fits the old definition of poetry: war is the thing
that gets lost in translation.
When I was taking my survey a friend told me that he was sitting with his father, a veteran of the
European campaign, watching a TV special on the 50th anniversary of D day. My friend suddenly
had the impulse to ask a question that had never occurred to him in his entire adult life: "What was
it really like to be in a battle?"
His father opened his mouth to answer -- and then his jaw worked, his face reddened, and,
without saying a word, he got up and walked out of the room. That's the truth about the war: the
sense that what happened over there simply can't be told in the language of peace.
But is it really impossible to get across that barrier, even in imagination? Mementos of war
surround us, and people surely wouldn't keep them around if they retained nothing of their truth.
Sometimes when I've stared too long at the porcelain tiger on my bookshelf, I do get the sense that
I'm looking into something deeper and more mysterious than a gaudy statuette that was once
hawked to a departing soldier looking for souvenirs. I can almost hear behind its silent roar another
sound, a more resonant bellow -- as though war were a storm raging through an immeasurable
abyss, and this little trinket preserved an echo of its thunder.
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