But these practices, certainly more favourable to night attacks, have been discontinued in later days; and armies being now no longer in regard to subsistence and requirements for encampment, such independent bodies complete in themselves, find it necessary to keep usually a day’s march between themselves and the enemy. If we now keep in view especially the night attack of an army, it follows that sufficient motives for it can seldom occur, and that they fall under one or other of the following classes. 1. An unusual degree of carelessness or audacity which very rarely occurs, and when it does is compensated for by a great superiority in moral force. 2. A panic in the enemy’s army, or generally such a degree of superiority in moral force on our side, that this is sufficient to supply the place of guidance in action. 3. Cutting through an enemy’s army of superior force, which keeps us enveloped, because in this all depends on surprise, and the object of merely making a passage by force, allows a much greater concentration of forces. 4. Finally, in desperate cases, when our forces have such a disproportion to the enemy’s, that we see no possibility of success, except through extraordinary daring. But in all these cases there is still the condition that the enemy’s army is under our eyes, and protected by no advance-guard. As for the rest, most night combats are so conducted as to end with daylight, so that only the approach and the first attack are made under cover of darkness, because the assailant in that manner can better profit by the consequences of the state of confusion into which he throws his adversary; and combats of this description which do not commence until daybreak, in which the night therefore is only made use of to approach, are not to be counted as night combats. BOOK V MILITARY FORCES CHAPTER I. General Scheme We shall consider military forces: 1. As regards their numerical strength and organisation. 2. In their state independent of fighting. 3. In respect of their maintenance; and, lastly, 4. In their general relations to country and ground. Thus we shall devote this book to the consideration of things appertaining to an army, which only come under the head of _necessary conditions of fighting_, but do not constitute the fight itself. They stand in more or less close connection with and react upon the fighting, and therefore, in considering the application of the combat they must often appear; but we must first consider each by itself, as a whole, in its essence and peculiarities. CHAPTER II. Theatre of War, Army, Campaign The nature of the things does not allow of a completely satisfactory definition of these three factors, denoting respectively, space, mass, and time in war; but that we may not sometimes be quite misunderstood, we must try to make somewhat plainer the usual meaning of these terms, to which we shall in most cases adhere. 1.—Theatre of War.