disposed to give up the ground, and if the attack had been renewed,
they would still have offered a most determined resistance, which would
have undoubtedly ended in their complete defeat, but would have cost
the conqueror much further bloodshed. We must therefore reckon the
Battle of Borodino as amongst battles, like Bautzen, left unfinished.
At Bautzen the vanquished preferred to quit the field sooner; at
Borodino the conqueror preferred to content himself with a half
victory, not because the decision appeared doubtful, but because he was
not rich enough to pay for the whole.
Returning now to our subject, the deduction from our reflections in
relation to the first stage of pursuit is, that the energy thrown into
it chiefly determines the value of the victory; that this pursuit is a
second act of the victory, in many cases more important also than the
first, and that strategy, whilst here approaching tactics to receive
from it the harvest of success, exercises the first act of her
authority by demanding this completion of the victory.
But further, the effects of victory are very seldom found to stop with
this first pursuit; now first begins the real career to which victory
lent velocity. This course is conditioned as we have already said, by
other relations of which it is not yet time to speak. But we must here
mention, what there is of a general character in the pursuit in order
to avoid repetition when the subject occurs again.
In the further stages of pursuit, again, we can distinguish three
degrees: the simple pursuit, a hard pursuit, and a parallel march to
intercept.
The simple _following_ or _pursuing_ causes the enemy to continue his
retreat, until he thinks he can risk another battle. It will therefore
in its effect suffice to exhaust the advantages gained, and besides
that, all that the enemy cannot carry with him, sick, wounded, and
disabled from fatigue, quantities of baggage, and carriages of all
kinds, will fall into our hands, but this mere following does not tend
to heighten the disorder in the enemy’s Army, an effect which is
produced by the two following causes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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