On War

In March 1831 Carl von Clausewitz was sent east to the Polish border as chief of staff to Field Marshal Gneisenau. By then he had sealed the manuscript he had been writing since about 1816, and he never opened it again. He died of cholera in Breslau in November 1831, having written in a note that he considered only the first chapter of Book One finished. His widow, Marie von Clausewitz, published the eight books as they stood, in three volumes between 1832 and 1834. The book's central claim is that war belongs to politics: it continues a state's political dealings by other means, so every campaign has to be judged by the political purpose it serves, and that purpose sets how far the fighting should go. The military theorists of his day had hoped for rules. The Prussian writer Heinrich von Bülow reduced strategy to the geometry of an army's supply base; the Swiss theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini built his on interior lines. Clausewitz answered that war is fought in danger and exhaustion, on reports that are mostly contradictory or false, and he called the sum of these drags on action friction. J. J. Graham's English translation appeared in London in 1873, and in 1876 the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, the German national biographical dictionary, credited Prussia's campaigns of 1866 and 1870–71, directed by Helmuth von Moltke, to Clausewitz's way of thinking. Lenin worked through the book in Swiss exile in 1915, and the 1976 translation by Michael Howard and Peter Paret became the standard English text.