The Reality of War:A Companion to Clausewitz

A Companion to Clausewitz

9781465595973

Library of Alexandria

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Overview

Great books, the masterpieces of the special branch of knowledge with which they deal, are often very big books; and busy men, who have not unlimited time for reading, find it helpful to have some one who will give them a general summary of a famous writer’s teaching, and point out the most important passages in which the author himself embodies the very essence of his argument. This is what Major Murray has done for the most important work on war that was ever written. He does not give a mere dry summary of its contents. He sets forth, in language so plain that even the civilian reader or the youngest soldier can read it with interest, the essence of the teaching of Clausewitz, and he embodies in his book the most striking passages of the original work. He adds to each section of his subject some useful criticisms, and at the end of the book he sums up the effect of recent changes on the practice of war. The book is a popular manual of the realities of war, which should be read not only by soldiers, but by every one who takes an intelligent interest in the great events of our time. As to the practical value of the writings of Clausewitz, it may be well to quote here the words of Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, the Professor of Military History at Oxford, from his introduction to the original edition of Major Murray’s work: "Clausewitz was a Prussian officer who first saw fighting as a boy in 1793, and whose experience of war lasted until 1815, when the great war ended. He was then thirty-five and spent the next fifteen years in trying to clear his mind on the subject of war, which he did by writing a number of military histories and a systematic treatise 'On War.' At the age of fifty he tied his manuscripts into a parcel, hoping to work at them again on the conclusion of the duties for which he was ordered from home. A little more than a year later he died at Breslau of cholera, and the papers, to which he had never put the finishing touch, were afterwards published by his widow.