I am constrained to recapitulate the principal facts which may be regarded as fundamental in war. War in its _ensemble_ is not a science, but an art. Strategy, particularly, may indeed be regulated by fixed laws resembling those of the positive sciences, but this is not true of war viewed as a whole. Among other things, combats may be mentioned as often being quite independent of scientific combinations, and they may become essentially dramatic, personal qualities and inspirations and a thousand other things frequently being the controlling elements. The passions which agitate the masses that are brought into collision, the warlike qualities of these masses, the energy and talent of their commanders, the spirit, more or less martial, of nations and epochs,[51]--in a word, every thing that can be called the poetry and metaphysics of war,--will have a permanent influence on its results. Shall I be understood as saying that there are no such things as tactical rules, and that no theory of tactics can be useful? What military man of intelligence would be guilty of such an absurdity? Are we to imagine that Eugene and Marlborough triumphed simply by inspiration or by the superior courage and discipline of their battalions? Or do we find in the events of Turin, Blenheim, and Ramillies maneuvers resembling those seen at Talavera, Waterloo, Jena, or Austerlitz, which were the causes of the victory in each case? When the application of a rule and the consequent maneuver have procured victory a hundred times for skillful generals, and always have in their favor the great probability of leading to success, shall their occasional failure be a sufficient reason for entirely denying their value and for distrusting the effect of the study of the art? Shall a theory be pronounced absurd because it has only three-fourths of the whole number of chances of success in its favor? The _morale_ of an army and its chief officers has an influence upon the fate of a war; and this seems to be due to a certain physical effect produced by the moral cause. For example, the impetuous attack upon a hostile line of twenty thousand brave men whose feelings are thoroughly enlisted in their cause will produce a much more powerful effect than the attack of forty thousand demoralized or apathetic men upon the same point. Strategy, as has already been explained, is the art of bringing the greatest part of the forces of an army upon the important point of the theater of war or of the zone of operations. Tactics is the art of using these masses at the points to which they shall have been conducted by well-arranged marches; that is to say, the art of making them act at the decisive moment and at the decisive point of the field of battle. When troops are thinking more of flight than of fight, they can no longer be termed active masses in the sense in which I use the term.