In Our Time - Clausewitz and On War

Episode Date: May 17, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss On War, a treatise on the theory and practice of warfare written by the Prussian soldier and intellectual Carl von Clausewitz. First published in 1832, Clausewitz's magnum opus is commonly regarded as the most important book about military theory ever written. Informed by its author's experience of fighting against the mighty armies of Napoleon, the work looks not just at the practicalities of warfare, but offers a subtle philosophical analysis of the nature of war and its relationship with politics. Notions such as the Clausewitzian Trinity have had an enormous effect on later military leaders. But its influence is felt today not just on the battlefield but also in politics and business.With:Saul DavidProfessor of War Studies at the University of BuckinghamHew StrachanChichele Professor of the History of War at the University of OxfordBeatrice HeuserProfessor of International Relations at the University of Reading.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the 19th century Prussian general, Karl von Klauswitz, never commanded an army, a job for which his superiors thought him unsuitable. But although his achievements on the battlefield were slight,

Klausvitz remains one of the most celebrated figures in military history. His fame rests on a book published in 1832, the year after his death, titled On War, It's a comprehensive treatise on the philosophy and practice of warfare. The first edition of the book made barely any impression. But within a few generations, Klausovich was recognised as one of history's most important military strategists. The book is filled with quotations familiar today, in particular his notion of war as the continuation of politics by other means. Klausvich's theories have been widely taught in military academies for over and

century and have influenced wars fought all over the globe, although today some question his relevance in an age when terrorism has changed the nature of warfare. With me to discuss Glasgow Fitz and on war are Saul David, Professor of War Studies at the University of Buckingham, Hugh Strawn, Chichley Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, and Beatrice Hoiser, Professor of International Relations at the University of Reading. Can you tell us a bit Saul Davis about Claswitch's early life? Yes, he was born in 1780 in Bergh in Prussia near Magdeburg, the son of a solid middle-class family and one that had been devoutly Lutheran for a number of generations, his great-grandfather

and his great-great-grandfather were both Lutheran pastors and his grandfather was professor of theology. His father began to change things. His father actually, for a time, was a junior officer in the Prussian army during the Seven Years' War. and it was because of this military connection that Klazavits himself grew up in a very military atmosphere. He said later that he was born into the camp of the Prussian army. And I think what he meant by that is the influence that a lot of his father's ex-comrades who were courted in Berg

had on him as a young boy, he would hear the conversations around the dinner table. Now, what's significant about the Prussian army at this point is that it had the highest reputation of a military force in Europe. A reputation made during the Seven Years' War, in Frederick the Great, of course, he was not only king, but also commander-in-chief had won some of the finest victories in history against not just one power, but three. They fought off the armies of France, also Austria and Russia.

And it was an army, of course, that young Klausovitz was very honored, I suppose, to have been part of. You use the word honours because of it, honored because of its aristocratic component. That's exactly right. His father actually was demobbed after the seven years' war because he was not aristocratic. Roughly nine-tenths of the officer corps of the Prussian army at the time of Frederick the Great's death in 1786 were aristocrats.

So it was quite unusual for a middle-class boy to gain acceptance. But of course he had this connection from his father. His father's stepbrother was also the ex-commanding officer of the 34th infantry regiment that he joined. And it was because of these family connections that he was able to gain access. I read that he was a cadet at the age of. 12 and went into the army at 13 was near some action then.

That's young. It's astonishing, isn't it? Do you think about it? I mean, this is almost Nelsonian in terms of how early he... Nelson joined at 12, didn't he? He joins at 12. And it wasn't that unusual, actually. But what is unusual is that he saw combat at 12 during the early stage

of the war between Prussia, Austria, and of course, revolutionary France. And it was this early experience of war, of course, that touches him quite greatly, because I think it taught him two things. One, to be natural, the war, of course, goes against Prussia by 1795. Prussia is knocked out of the war and it loses its possessions west of the Rhine. And I think it taught Klausovitz that you are to be naturally suspicious of coalition forces, but also an awareness that something was changing in war and that the French army, this nation in arms, was beginning to change the game

of war. And if Prussia was going to compete it, it had to find a way of infusing its armed forces with a similar spirit. There's also a massive sense of humiliation that this great aristocratic machine to which his father gains access and he said another relation and he went into, had been crushed by a popular force.

Exactly right. From 1795 to roughly 1800, 1801 when he enters the war school in Berlin, this is a period of reflection for him. It's a period of sort of partly working out what went wrong for the Prussians but also a period of self-education. It's a time when he is very much infused with the works of the German Enlightenment.

He reads people like Schiller, Gerta and Holderlin. And he begins to take on board some of the intellectual prowess that will stand him in such good stead for the formulation of on war. Hugh Strzhorn, can we move on to 1806 when Prussia went to war with Napoleon's France and Klauswitz was there? Could you explain the significance of this experience, Ian? Can we develop that? Yes. Yainer is a turning point in Klauswitz's life. campaign in Vienna. Napoleon, in 1805, the pressure had been on the Prussians to rejoin the coalition. They've been out of the Napoleonic Wars, French Revolutionary War, since 1795. So 10 years of peace and an accumulating sense of frustration that Prussia was not

taking part in the wars against France and against Napoleon. Frustration on whose part? On the part of particularly young Prussian officers who felt... They wanted to be up and at a lot. I want to be up and at him felt that Claudeus Rhinx later about the balance of power. In one war, there's a short passage there. And the idea of a dominant France on the continent is not something he sees as natural. And of course, also an awareness that eventually this war may catch up with Prussia. The Prussia can't just separate itself from the wider events that are going on within Europe.

So in 1805, there is an attempt to form a grand coalition against Napoleon, which, of course, will include Britain from the naval dimension. but in terms of land warfare, centres on Austria, Russia and Prussia, or should have done, but Prussia didn't join in. And in 1805, in a magnificent campaign

in the views of the French, of course, resulting in essentially a major defeat of the Austrian and Russian forces at isolates in December 1805, Prussia suddenly finds itself on the back front. because it is now isolated. The other two powers have been defeated. There it is in Central Eastern Europe on its own. And the following year, Napoleon does what the Prussians had feared,

which is turned against Prussia. And what happens in the campaign, Klaus Fitts writes to his wife, future wife, Marie von Brul, to express his excitement of going to war again. Ten years has gone by. He's done an awful lot of preparation for this, and he's off on campaign. And he does what all generals do, which is express confidence in the outcome. I mean, sorry, all soldiers do. You have to believe you're going to win when you go to war despite Napoleon's reputation.

Well, of course, they don't win. They are absolutely smashed in the dual battles of Yehainer and Ausstadt. And what follows, destroys not just the army, but essentially the Prussian state as it had been bequeathed by Frederick the Great. The pursuit

is relentless. The pursuit of Napoleon of the Prussian forces. Absolutely. And the Cloussvitz himself becomes a prisoner of war and is not released until the peace at the end of the following year. So he spends time in France. So, I haven't got that... I know he was taking this a prisoner of war because I've read it in all your notes.

But where did they put him? Was he in a prisoner? Was he in a sophisticated house arrest? He treated and was sophisticated. He lives not too bad a life for all the moanings. And he moans like hell. I mean, he really disliked the French. I mean, he even says that, you know, they can't cook. What should be sweet as sour and what should be sour as sweet or savory, I suppose we would say.

So one of the beauties of his relationship with his wife is we know all this because he's writing home to express his disgruntlement. Rather than usually, he had spent time become an autodidact, met one particular one tutory figure in the military. Academy who took him up and saw he was a brilliant young man. He got top honours. Did he continue his studies while he was under this sophisticated house arrest in France? Yes, I think this is, we need to understand that Clanswitz is a man who is constantly engaged

in intellectual activity across a very broad range of subjects. What you referred to this intellectual figure is Shanhorst, who is really an incredibly important figure between 1806 and 1812 in the history of the Prussian army. the man who had said to Klausvitz that the study of war is not just a theoretical exercise, it's not something you can just do by engaging with the works of the Enlightenment, which is what he'd done after 1795, you do have to engage with experience.

And if you haven't got the experience, then you've got to read military history. That's the nearest thing you can do to put the ideas against the reality and to think about the relationship between the two. But the spread of his reading, I mean, he's going from Isaac Newton to Kant, He's really taking it on, isn't he?

Absolutely. And when we know what he was borrowing from the library later in his life. And it works on engineering, mathematics, law. This is a true product of the Enlightenment in that sense. Here is somebody who sees human knowledge as interrelated and as worthy of exploration rather than being thought of in terms of small disciplines. individual dismiss. Excuse me, sir.

Beatrice Sard, you make that point that the fact that he had not had a classical education, unlike most of his Iroo-Socratic peers, he'd not had that, was an advantage. He hadn't read Cicero, he hadn't read Thucydides, he hadn't read Julius Caesar, he didn't have Latin, he didn't have Greek. And because he studied other things so intently, you thought that proved to be an advantage? I think so, because he actually took on board all of the things

that Hugh just mentioned, such as mathematics and physics and new experiments that he'd probably watched in his own lifetime and constructed from this something quite fresh, quite new. And I think that actually made his work so original in many respects because many people before him had been in a way straight-jacketed by the fact that they were trying to follow an old model and they'd all read the old models before them and they'd all read their societies, etc.,

and thought, oh, I must integrate that because they're good scholars and they put their good footnotes in. And Klausovitz and he made a fresh departure from that. He comes at the end of a long period where people gradually become convinced that they don't really need to read the ancients. but that modern experience is much more important and much more fresh and relevant to them. And Klausovitz expresses that very strongly.

He says actually the more recent the wars are, the more important they are for us. And he himself only studied wars from really the 30 years war onwards and mainly the campaigns of Frederick and then the ones that he'd actually witnessed in his own lifetime. Then an extraordinary thing happened on the part of this very fierce, proud Prussian. when the Prussians joined up with Napoleon to march on Russia, he so hated the idea of being on the side of Napoleon that he quit the Prussian army and went and fought for the Russians with a few other officers.

That was quite something, wasn't it? And wrote dreadful document which even the Nazis were inordinately fond of because it had wonderful, quotable passages about Prussian national fervor and German national fervor. Absolutely. And it's actually this document to which one should turn to look at some of his more political ideas. But let's just talk about that action that he is a young man did.

His ambitious young man, is he going to unbearable with the Prussian army? As they were calling him up, come on, we're going to war again. He says, no, I don't be on the side of the French. I'm going to smash the French. I'm going to join your Prussian enemies. It's a big thing to do. What was it a big thing to do? It was a big thing to do, but there were other people who were around him

who were thinking in the same way, and there were quite a number of Prussian exiles who went with him to join the Russian camp. And in spirit, the people that he was most fond of, Shahn-Hawson-Knau were pushing in the same direction. So in fact, this amazing document that we have from 1812 is a letter that he wrote to Gnizenau to explain his own reasoning for this particular move.

Were they helpful, these Russians to the Russians, or did the Russians just say this is a bit of a propaganda coup? Or did they do anything that mattered? I think we all snigger because we rather doubt that they did very much. We know from Klauswitz's own account of the Russian campaign on Napoleon's Russian campaign that he was really on the margins of many of these movements. He becomes quite, the Prussians actually become quite important

only in January 1813 when they gradually move towards making an alliance with Prussia, when Prussia breaks out of the alliance with Napoleon, and actually turns the tables on France and joins up with Russia. At that stage, the Prussians in the entourage of the Tsar actually become important. But before that, we know that they didn't speak any Russian. We know that they were far from, Klausowitz has a lovely little story where he was arrested when he was supposed to work as a courier at one stage

because he couldn't speak Russian. And despite the fact that he had a whole portfolio with him to say who he was, nobody believed him. They thought he was a spy. On the other hand, he was on the side that smashed the French and that pleased him no end. Absolutely, yes. This was the thing that he really enjoyed doing.

And what did he get out of that experience for his subsequent theories which we're coming to? Masses, and this is actually very important. Obviously 200 years ago, Russian campaigned Napoleon, is really an enormously important marker for him, not just the youth experience that he had, but this was the other big experience.

He concludes from this, this interesting point, that the defensive is the stronger of the two rather than the offensive. He does conclude, he does concede that the Russians were in a very particular situation. In his book Six of On War, where he discusses this amazing phenomenon of the people's war, a people that mobilizes entirely against an occupation force and how this could be done.

He concedes that some countries would have infinite advantage over others if they actually have them, the space that Russia has, and that this might actually be unique to Russia. Nevertheless, this whole experience in which he saw the Napoleonic army dwindle from 300,000 to 200,000 to 100,000 to about 20,000 within the period of a six-month campaign marked him enormously, and his own account of the Russian campaign is very full of that, and you realize how shocked he is by this enormous loss of human life.

So there are two things there here, because he admired the Levi-on-Mass than Napoleon, the massing of a great national. national, fervent national army, and yet he saw in Russia the power of defence. So he was present, as it were, of one facing the other, these two great ideas. Yes, but I mean the Napoleonic army had moved quite long beyond the Levy en masse because this was actually a very professional army that he'd mustered. The experience of that is, however, that he doesn't simply believe so many of his successors did

in the offensive au trance and this idea that the offensive is always right, because he actually identifies Napoleon's shortcoming in the great thing that he usually found so successful, namely the speed with which he moved on, because the speed with which Napoleon moved across this enormous distance in Russia was actually one of the main reasons, Klausovitz identifies, why he lost so many people, because the stragglers couldn't keep up,

the wounded were left behind, the people who'd fallen ill during the march were left behind. And he identifies that as one of the main, or the main reason for the big losses Napoleon had. No wonder he learned Napoleon, although he admired him of all as a general. Come back to Saul David here. They never really forgave him in Prussia. They took him back, they gave him important jobs, but not significant jobs, didn't there?

But he became director of the war school in Berlin in 1818, and he sort of began to work on war then, which he worked on for the next 13 years of his life until he died when he was 51. Did he have a purpose when he began writing, were these notes towards a book or notes? it's hard to tell when he exactly decided to compile his work into something that would be published and have a wider audience. It's hard to tell exactly what he wrote and when he wrote it and when he revised it. This is a great sort of dispute among scholars today.

But I think in very general terms, you could say that the book, or the book that we now know as on war had two purposes. It was to be read by military analysts in general, and that is both theorists of war. In other words, people who would write on war, but also practitioners of war, he would hope that by reading on war, they would become more proficient and that the writing of on war would become more effective. It would search for deeper truths about the nature of war and about how you actually went about fighting it. And I think it's probably not too far to say that he would have hoped

that some senior commanders would have used on war as a means of improving, probably the best way of putting it is their judgment of war, because certainly it wasn't a blueprint for how to fight. And did he consult people? Do we know his sources? I mean, we know this furious education he gave himself. We know that he was taken up by people in the German high command and well thought of in scholar.

So what did he draw on? Well, he had been heavily influenced, as he was already pointed out, by Shanhorse. But I think the vast majority of the rest of the material that goes into, or the thinking that goes into On War is from two things. One, from his reading, his self-education, and two from his own personal experience. And certainly a big chunk of On War, books three to six, are pretty much concentrated on Napoleonic warfare,

how you go about fighting everything from tactics to strategy, as he called it, although I think probably, as Hughes pointed out, quite rightly. In strict terms, it's more to do with the operational aspect of war, which is really how battles linked together in a campaign rather than how the politics interlinks with the fighting of war. Hugh Straught, he certainly goes to the heart of it. He begins with a definition of warfare. Will you tell me, I've got it written down,

but you're the man who knows all about it. Well, the opening definition absolutely is war is a clash of wills. And I think the essence of what he thinks about war is that it is a reciprocal relationship, that war has its own existence, which comes from the competition, between two sides. So it assumes a dynamic of its own.

And I think very often today we become obsessed with this notion that war is the continuation of policy by other means, which is whenever Klaus Witsyn is used as an adjective in the press, that will be the context in which it is applied. But that, of course, is a very unilateral view. You know, I intend to do something, therefore I'll use a war to do it. That isn't war. That is an intention, a policy intention, really.

It's a remark about policy rather than a remark about war itself. And he's very explicit in some of the things he says about war as an act of violence. And that violence, even if there are pauses in war, moments when two sides aren't clashing, the threat that there will be violence, the threat that people will be killed, is what lies at its heart and what makes it effective. Because as he was looking back, what he tries to do is think not only of his own experience, but what is different about the war that he experienced from the war that his father experienced

to the army of Frederick the Great. And one of the reasons he writes this book six on war on defense is precisely because he sees Frederick the Great's wars also as defensive wars and as a great deal of reference to those campaigns as well as to the War of 1812 and what he is discussing. So what he's concerned to do there

is to think about change over time and what has happened to war in that, in a relatively circumscribed period, between 1742-43 and his own lifetime. And what is consistent? And the consistent thing is this element of reciprocity, this role of violence which gives it its inner meaning. But there's almost as an immoral, previously when people wrote about war,

in the much earlier that century before, they were saying, let's have war as a way of getting back to peace and to coexistence. But there's one quotation in here. He says war is an act of violence intended to force our opponents to fulfil our will. I mean, he's talking about crushing people, isn't he? And not allowing them a chance to come back in any way. Well, this goes to the heart, really, of one of the debates in war, which Clansfitt's addressed in one of two prefaces,

or certainly what is known as his most important preface written in 1827, where he says war essentially is of two kinds, and there can be wars which are more moderate go for more limited objectives. So war has violence at its heart, but what then happens in practice may not be as violent as that expression suggests. And I think one of the things we constantly come up against on war is that it's a book that is correcting itself, revising its own judgments throughout

there is a constant debate going on at this book. You will always find a quotation in Cloussvitz to prove almost whatever you want because this is a mind that is too fertile. If I'm being flippant, I tend to say if Claswick's is alive, a Clousin's in the studio with us now, he'd still be writing this book because this is, this is,

you asked Saul earlier about publication, there is a way in which this book was never going to be ready for publication. He'd be the sort of author that would drive his publisher absolutely crazy. So his early death-help publication? Without his widow, it's hard to see how this book would have seen the light of day.

And Bejus Hewisor, and Hugh Strawn has mentioned the phrase was a continuation of politics by the means, and despite the fact that it's used as a cliche, I'd still like to examine it. What does it mean to you that? Is that quotation precisely correct, first of all? Can I tie it up with three other points?

Because there is actually an absent item here. Because there are a number of ideas that Klausowitz has drawn from his mate somebody called August Ruele von Lillenstein. He was in the same promotion, and he wrote a book, a little pamphlet called On War during the Napoleonic Wars.

Klausovitz cripped the title. Klausovitz cripped the idea from that that war is a continuation of politics because Rulid actually already formulated in a subsequent book, which was a handbook for soldiers, which everybody was using, including Klausovitz, that no war is without a political purpose.

War is always something with a political purpose. And Rule von Lillenstern actually declined, war in a sense where he started with the wrestling game between two parties and then the confrontation between two units and then the confrontation between two armies, etc. And all this is actually something that Klausowitz must have been intimately familiar with. And we find that in his on war, when he uses this shortcut about war is this interaction that Hugh Strawn was pointing towards, this wrestling game, these two sides, it's as though he was summarizing the first four pages of Ruele von Lieden-Sheld's handbook where he starts with. Is this case of dreadful plagiarism

or useful selectivity. Useful subjectivity, I think. Nevertheless, it would have been nice if you'd had a footnote there somewhere because at least the very tight case is so totally. You've given in a very good footnote. But the very crucial thing is that there is a huge difference but in one respect between Rula von Mielinstein and Klausovitz

and it's precisely over this issue of what war is the continuation of. Because the strange thing, the strangest of all things is that Klausavits is so famous for a line which he himself fails to explore in on war. He says war is the instrument of politics, but then he doesn't actually go through all the different political permutations you might have and how those might affect war. Except then there's one point where he almost slips into a Higalian dualism

when he suddenly says, oh, it could be of two sorts, namely limited and unlimited, which is, of course, rubbish and he realizes that because he then realizes it's actually a sliding scale. It could be anything from very limited to very extreme. But the interesting thing is that he doesn't actually, unlike other people of his own generation, like Jomini, explore how a particular political purpose might impact. on war. He doesn't do that in great detail. He's only got a little bit in book 8 when he says, yeah, if all we want to do is get a little hamlet in order to trade it for peace negotiations, we'll fight differently from the way we will if our entire existence at stake.

Nevertheless, he said enough to engage people's interests for a very long time. It doesn't, of course, it doesn't. Saul David, he talks about military leaders and they're very important to him. And Napoleon, whom he loves intensely, is his tutory genius, isn't he really. What are the most important factors in a man of genius who is of optimum importance on the battlefield? I think what's interesting about his ideal for a man of genius is that actually it's almost an innate series of talents rather than something you can learn. And this sort of, in some ways, blows the theory out of the water. You know, you've got to be born a great general. Obviously, it helps if you join the army. But there were certain.

things that he actually pinpointed rather than become a professor, for example. But there were certain things he pinpointed, certain obvious things, I suppose, equanimity of character, of character calmness under pressure, a strong constitution so that you could survive the rigours of campaign. And then, of course, the more curious innate elements that really go to the heart of genius. And for this, he used the French term coup d'i, the ability to see through the forese, the ability to see through the fog of war, be able to see beyond the uncertainty and the confusion, and to be able to process information very rapidly. It was interesting that certainly quite a high intellectual capacity was necessary in his genius for war. And he makes the rather un-PC point, I suppose, that no primitive people could ever produce a great general, because they simply don't have that learning

and that intellectual capacity. But that coup d'i certainly was something he saw in Napoleon, and at Austerlitz, famously, where he waits, waits, waits to launch his attack on the Pratton Heights, where his own wing of his own army is almost being destroyed. He has to go at just the right time. That is what he would have identified as Kudai. And then one other thing, which actually goes to one of the famous comments of Wellington, which is the ability to see on the other side of the hill.

In other words, have an understanding of geography, to be able to have this map of the terrain in which you're operating at all times. And yet in the end, it came down to someone who was either born with those talents or wasn't. Hugh Strachan, one of his concepts is an idea that he calls the Trinity of warfare. Can you explain that? Yes, he sees war as, and I think that the central point, Trinity, after all, Saul's already said, here is somebody has Lutheran pastors in his background. So I think he's very self-knowing when he uses a word like Trinity with its Christian connotations.

and if there is a three in one, he doesn't specify what the one is, but I think implicitly it must be war because this is what the book is about. It's not about anything else. There has been a tendency sometimes because of our elevation of the idea of the relationship between war and policy

that it has to be a policy that actually unites all this. But actually, in his understanding of the Trinity, what he says the three elements are is, first of all, passion and emotion, really raw. emotion. Secondly, what he calls the player of probability and chance, the role of the application, if like, of living with these elements and doing it, the function of the army commander. And thirdly, logic, reason. And he identifies each of these characteristics in a sort of second order, Trinity, with particular attributes of the state, with the people in the case of passion,

with the army in the case of the play of probability and chance and with the government in relation to reason. The point essentially here is that there is no pre-subposition in the writing of that passage that the government will come out or that policy will come out as the dominant elements. These are three elements which he likenes to magnets which are constantly interacting with each other and of course policy and logic could be entirely suppressed by passion. Beatrice Reyes-Roisso, is this in any way a manual?

The whole book. Yeah. Well, it's inside the book. It's a long book. It's a hybrid. But can it be used as a manual? I think it shouldn't be because the manual parts in it are completely obsolete. Those are the ones in the middle that as all mentioned

that are really about hard to afforded. In military and technology, etc. But may I just come back to the Trinity for a moment? Yeah, just for a moment. It's actually most, I think it's the most important. contribution that Klauswitz has made to understanding in war in some respects, because I think Klausovits has discovered something that

most political scientists today are still struggling with, namely that very important phenomena are not monocausal. He has discovered that there are many... Not monocausal. And this is supposed to be studied as Euler, isn't it really? That's what I... Yes, I think that. But basically, he's discovered a number of different variables, the

Trinity being the most important three, where he realized that these variables are actually on top of everything else interrelated. which means one can make another stronger and the impact on that on the thing itself, war can then have another development. And I think that is so amazing because it shows that you can't simply take a phenomenon like war

and say, oh, if only you have the greater numbers, then everything will flow from that. Oh, if only you're on the top of the hill, then everything will flow from that. If only you'll use massive firepower, everything will flow from that. And I think that's his amazing contribution to which you then also adds a number of other variables

like culture, like particular aims, political aims in warfare, and morale. And morale, indeed. And she's the fierceness of a nation united as being an extraordinary power in itself. Absolutely. But this, in a way, it could be seen as part of the Trinity when he talks about the people having this. But I think that whole approach is the one that is most lasting

because many individual bits can change. You can say that, oh, today we don't necessarily have a conscript force any longer or a standing army or whatever. And therefore, what we're talking about, when we're talking about small wars may not contain this particular structure of the society that he talks about in the Trinity. Nevertheless, this idea that you have these different variables which interact in very curious ways

that actually are the driving forces for war, and that's how you have to understand the outcome, is absolutely superb. Saul, David, the book was published a year after, about a year after his death in 1832, largely because of his wife. We might interpolate very quickly. He had to court her for seven years because she was an Irish secret and their family didn't approve of him because he was not an Irish secret. Then he did eventually marry when he became...

chief general staff or some, got some military title, and Devon got slipped in after that, but he did better socially after that and got accepted at court and so on. So she, and it seems to be an extraordinary happy marriage, an extraordinary, happy marriage, an extraordinary. When he died, she edited the book and put it together. So can you tell us just a little bit about how she did that? She, well, of course,

and part of the problem with him not actually putting the book together is unlike the three of us when we go through the publishing process, it's heavily edited, it comes back to us, we edit it more, we refine it ourselves, and of course he wasn't around to do that, so it was left to her and to her brother, his brother-in-law,

and the original editions that come out between 1832 and 1834 are the final word, as it were, is left with the editors. And this is a problem in the understanding or at least the interpretation of on war ever since, that it changes as every new editor works on it. And of course the problem we've got in the English language,

not a problem for Beatrice, of course, is that we have to rely on translations if we don't speak German, and the translation itself is going to change things slightly. But I think it's what's significant about these early issues of the book is that they weren't widely read. They were, I think, as late as the 1840s, the original 1,500 copies still hadn't sold out. So you get a sense of a book that actually took time to gain some currency.

But it looks like this doesn't have to sell a lot to have, influence, does it? It didn't, but it wasn't widely known outside pressure, I think you could say, until the Franco-Prussian War. And of course, the reason it changes in the Franco-Prussian war is because the incredible success of the Prussians against, in fact, in first the Austrians in 1866 and then, of course, the French in 1878, 71, leading to the unification of Germany, makes people turn around and think, hold on a second, what is it about this Prussian army? What is laying behind it? What sort of blueprint are they using? And it didn't help that Of course, the famous chief of general staff of pressure at that time, Von Malka,

actually cites Klausovitz as one of his main inspirations. So can we talk about his ideas how they percolated through? It took quite a while to take off as Saul Nevi just told us, Beatrice. But can you take it up to von Malka? What's happening then with his ideas? And what's happening to the armies that they need to be changed? I mean, it's a great comeback for the Prussians. They're the best. This is very simple.

They're best, they get smashed, they are all over the place, and then, well, it takes a while, but they come back again in full force. And may I bring in your question again, whether this was a manual. Obviously, people were looking for a recipe for success, and they were trying to find the simple, distillable lesson in Klausovits' book, which, as we said, was a hybrid, was actually mainly about, his main purpose had been to make people, as Saul was saying, a better judge of what warfare was about, a better theoretical refer. in order then to be able to do something themselves with these ideas. But then there were big sections in it which were about practical things, which is why it was a hybrid and why in parts of it was actually a handbook. And people homed in on that because they felt that those were the areas, particularly if they were military, were the ones they most easily understood.

And those sections, those books of On War, the middle books of On War, are actually mainly about Napoleonic Warfare. So very crucially, people thought, ah, here is the recipe for success. and the recipe for success was written all over the first version of war. The recipe for success was this big annihilation battle. It was time and again what he expressed several times as the purpose of war, namely the crushing of the enemy armed forces, the crushing, the disarming of the enemy,

the throwing him down, the crushing of the enemy. And over and over again, it was this theme of destroying the armed forces, which he'd taken from the Napoleonic Wars, and which at the very last part of his revising on war he'd started to mitigate by saying, ah, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that. But it doesn't have to be that parts were however not the ones that interested people

when they read on war in the 19th century and looked for the recipe for success. Can we move who's drawn into the 20th century now? Did class which his theories obtain in the way in which the German high command operated in the First World War? That was a classic criticism produced by British thinkers in the interwar period, particularly Basil Little Harves, who I often wonder,

and I'd be interested to know what the others think, but I often wonder whether he's really very close. He certainly hadn't read it in German. And yes, he did come to understand him a bit better later in life. But immediately after the First World War, he turns around and he says, first of all, Britain shouldn't have got involved in this sort of warfare. that is to say mass army European warfare on the continent. It isn't appropriate to Britain.

We're talking about Little now. We're talking about Little Harms and his handling of Klausvitz. Britain should not have got involved in that sort of warfare. And it is a sort of warfare defined by Klausvitz, the war of the mass army and the decisive battle. So what he's really done and what successive generations have done with Klauswitz is taken the way in which one of the way

in which one particular army or one particular school of military thought has taken to Klausvitz and taken that to be Klausvitz. And so removed the debate within Klausvitz himself from view. And really from 1918, right through until after the Second World War, very few people in Britain are prepared to take Klausvitz seriously, precisely because he's associated with this model of an exaggerated form of Napoleonic warfare. Can I go back to my original question, which was probably too naive, for you to bother to answer, but still, did the German,

had the German high command taken real note of Klausvitz? Well, did they say, having had such stunning success in the last quarter of the 19th century, and people saying it were part of the success, part of the success, to do this man's ideas. Were they still reading this man's ideas and taking note of him and operating from that verse? Well, the answer is they were reading bits.

They were reading the bits that suited the argument. I mean, Alfa Verand-Franchlefen, the Chief of the General Staff up until 1905, the man with whom we associate the 1914 plan, Reichler-Rongley, wrote the forward to the 1905 edition of on war. I presumably he'd read it. Well, I think he had, yes, he had, but he had read it. He was a believer in the imports of the decisive battle.

He knew Prussia had to fight a short war. So what he's doing is reading it selectively in order to look at it as the perfectability. I mean, the real issue, here is that is and what the Prussian General staff is concerned with is where battle sits within war. Klausvitz said that strategy

is the use of the battle for the purposes of the war. In other words, you fight a battle and then you think what do you do with it? How do you actually make it work for you in a strategic sense? How they understand Strashy, I mean that is say the Prussian General Staff is how do we maneuver so that we get the battle and the battle

will decide everything. So you've gone from strategy into tactics strategy into the actual business of fighting, whereas Cloussvitz really sees that fighting is a means to another end. And that is where they had, in inverted commas, misread Clousvitz. They had used him selectively. What they're not concerned with is the relationship between war and policy.

That really is, and it's a very small element of the book anyway. So that becomes peripheral for them. Saul, David, can we bring Closwitz to bear on recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, even Afghanistan? We know that Colleen Powell studied Closwitz and so on. It had a huge influence on not just him, but many military men and thinkers in America. And in fact, a lot of the doctrine, a lot of the teaching in American War colleges to this day is heavily based on Klausovitz. And what, of course, they were doing is looking at the Trinity that both Beatrice and Hugh have discussed

and identifying in the Vietnam War the reasons for their defeat, the reasons were twofold, I think, one that there had been no clear political objective for the military men to follow and two that the people, the emotional aspect of war, hadn't been there either. In other words, it was a war that they couldn't win and they were determined thereafter to not make the same mistake again. Beatrice, can you tell us why his work is still controversial today? For some of the reasons that Hugh Strawn mentioned earlier on

for why people believed in him so much until the Second World War. For example, even today in Germany, people would be very suspicious if you were a Klausovitz expert. They sort of suspect that it means that you are up to no good at all. And it's the same sort of connotation of, you know, why did this guy, why was this person's letter to Gnizner from 1812 read on the eve of Hitler's suicide in the Second World War? The association with Hitler has contaminated it. Absolutely, yeah, and with the National Socialists, because of all these patriotic passages in it.

And because there is, of course, this big thing. criticism of those who have selectively read Klausovits, the claim that he's advocating a massive all-out war, that he's advocating massive slaughter on the battlefield. And this idea is, this selective idea and its interpreters who would always be quoting Klausovits, is still something which make him rather persona non-grata. Appalingly briefly, Hugh Stront, can you say, do you think he's going to continue to be irrelevant? Yes, more so. I just feel he's been criticised recently for his acceptance.

of association with the state, and that really fails to understand what the book is about. The state is very important, and that's why Hitler and so on come within his thinking, but what he's centrally concerned with is war, and that includes all the actors in war, whether

state or non-state. Well, thank you very much, Beatrice Hoyser, Saul, David, and Hugh strong. Next week, we'll be talking about Marco Polo and his travels. Surprisingly, we haven't yet done it. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, Why not try others such as The Forum, the discussion program about global ideas? To find out more, visit BBCworldservice.com slash forum.