Pacifists are fond of talking about the “armaments race.” A curious sort of race――for which ponderous cart-horses are bred instead of steeple-chasers, and where the trainers clap “mass objective” blinkers on the horses’ heads, while the jockeys ride looking back over their shoulders. Then they wonder why instead of taking their fences freely the poor horses fall at the first open ditch, and cannot be got out under four years? There would seem to be a slight hitch somewhere in this Napoleonic doctrine. THE ORIGINS OF THE FALSE OBJECTIVE How arose this “blinkered” conception that the national goal in war could be attained only by mass destruction, and how did it gain so firm a hold on military thought? The decisive influence was exerted not by Napoleon himself, though his practical example of the beneficent results of “absolute war” was its inspiration, but by his great German expositor, Carl von Clausewitz. He it was who, in the years succeeding Waterloo, analysed, codified, and deified the Napoleonic method. Clausewitz has been the master at whose feet have sat for a century the military students of Europe. From him, the German Army in particular drew the inspiration by which they evolved their stupendous, if fundamentally unsound, structure of “the nation in arms.” It achieved its triumph in 1870 and, as a result, all the Powers hurried to imitate the model, and to revive with ever greater intensity the Napoleonic tradition, until finally the gigantic edifice was put to an extended test in the years 1914–1918――with the result that in its fall it has brought low not only Germany, but, with it, the rest of Europe. Thus, because of the unsoundness of their foundations, Clausewitz’s theories have ended by bringing his Fatherland into a more impotent and impoverished state even than when it was under the iron heel of Napoleon. Clausewitz’s was truly “a house built on sand.” Yet, despite his main miscalculations, he had a wider understanding of the objects of war than most of his disciples. Clausewitz did at least recognize the existence of other objectives besides the armed forces. He enumerated three general objects――the military power, the country, and the will of the enemy. But his vital mistake was to place “the will” last in his list, instead of first and embracing all the others, and to maintain that the destruction of the enemy’s main armies was the best way to ensure the remaining objects. Similarly, the other most famous military teacher of the century before the Great War, Marshal Foch, admitted the existence and wisdom, under certain conditions, of other means, but, as with Clausewitz, the reservations were forgotten, and his disciples remembered only his assertion that “the true theory” of war was “that of the absolute war which Napoleon had taught Europe.”