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Strategists are agreed that, had Kuropatkin's plans found competent agents to execute them, the Japanese advance would have been at least checked at Liaoyang. In fact, the Japanese, in drafting their original programme, had always expected that Nogi's army would be in a position on the left flank in the field long before there was any question of fighting at Liaoyang.
The news from everywhere else was good; and Federals were jubilant. So were the civilian strategists, particularly Stanton, who, though tied to his desk as Secretary of War, was busy wire-pulling Banks's men about the Valley. Stanton ordered Banks to take post at Strasburg and to hold the bridges at Front Royal with two detached battalions.
At the same time a very important change has to be noted in the views of Dutch strategists. Formerly the whole system of national defence centred in Amsterdam, and it must be added that the dykes have been mainly constructed with the idea of flooding the country round it.
Such was the general discontent with the war that men of importance at least so it was said at the time ventured to remind Alexander of his father's violent death. On the other side the urgency was becoming acute. As the strategists say, Napoleon had won a battle, but not a victory, at Friedland. The situation in Paris continued highly unsatisfactory.
On this principle, the Northern strategists had at last completed their gigantic plan for a general envelopment of the whole Confederate defense both by land and sea. Grant opened operations by crossing the Rapidan and telegraphing Sherman to advance into Georgia.
In war, time is as vital a factor as any other: and the strategist, who, like Napoleon, can think faster and decide more quickly and accurately than his antagonist is, ceteris paribus, sure to win; and even if ceteris are not quite paribus, his superior quickness and correctness will overcome great handicaps in material and personnel, as the lives of all the great strategists in history, especially Alexander and Napoleon, prove convincingly.
In the end his talk and his games of soldiers in preparation for a toy conquest of the world frightened his neighbours into a league against him; and that league has now caught him in just such a trap as his strategists were laying for his neighbours. We please ourselves by pretending that he did not try to extricate himself, and forced the war on us; but that is not true.
Our amateur strategists are divided as to the expediency of taking Versailles, with the whole Prussian quartier-général, or reopening communications with the provinces by the way of Orleans. The relative advantages of these two schemes is hotly debated in the newspapers and the pothouses.
Doubtless Moltke had ideas of this kind in mind when his plans for educating strategists and tacticians by problems on paper and by games were ridiculed by the unimaginative, and resisted by the indolent; and certainly no man was ever proved right more gloriously than Moltke.
This year witnessed also the death of Takeda Shingen, and thus Nobunaga not only established his sway over the whole of the provinces of Omi and Echizen but also was relieved from the constant menace of a formidable attack by a captain to whom public opinion justly attributed the leading place among Japanese strategists.
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