Quotes from Basil Henry Liddell Hart

Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing so self-blinding.

But time and surprise are the two most vital elements in war.

For whoever habitually suppresses the truth in the interests of tact will produce a deformity from the womb of his thought.

It would seem that Caesar's recurrent and deep-rooted fault was his concentration in pursuing the objective immediately in front of his eyes to the neglect of his wider object. Strategically he was an alternating Jekyll and Hyde.

For Caesar met failure each time he relied on the direct, and retrieved it each time he resorted to the indirect.

Epaminondas himself fell in the moment of victory, and in his death contributed not the least of his lessons to subsequent generations-by an exceptionally dramatic and convincing proof that an army and a state succumb quickest to paralysis of the brain.

While many lessons can be found in Frederick's campaigns, the main one would appear to be that his indirectness was too direct. To express this in another way, he regarded the indirect approach as a matter of pure manoeuvre with mobility, instead of a combination of manoeuvre with mobility and surprise. Thus, despite all his brilliance, his economy of force broke down.

Thus through the folly of a single hot-headed general, whose offensive spirit was not balanced by judgment, the Empire suffered a blow from which it never recovered-although it had sufficient power of endurance to survive, in a diminished form, for a further four hundred years.

Opposition to the truth is inevitable, especially if it takes the form of a new idea, but the degree of resistance can be diminished-by giving thought not only to the aim but to the method of approach.

Avoid a frontal attack on a long established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth. But, in any such indirect approach, take care not to diverge from the truth-for nothing is more fatal to its real advancement than to lapse into untruth.

Thus an excess of directness and a want of art, in the second phase, robbed Caesar of his chance of ending the war in one campaign, and condemned him to four more years of obstinate warfare all round the Mediterranean basin.

It was a strategic victory as bloodless for the defeated as for the victor-and the less men slain on the other side, the more potential adherents and recruits for Caesar. Despite the substitution of manoeuvre for direct assaults upon his enemy the campaign had cost him only six weeks of his time.

When the campaign had opened the scales were heavily weighted and steeply tilted on the side of Antigonus. Rarely has the balance of fortune so dramatically changed. It would seem clear that Antigonus's balance had been upset by the indirect approach which Cassander planned. This dislocated the mental balance of Antigonus, the moral balance of his troops and his subjects, and the physical balance of his military dispositions.

One direct approach had, by its vain cost, done much to undo the aggregate advantage which indirect approaches alone had built up. And it is not the least significant feature that the issue was finally settled, in the reverse way, by yet another example of the indirect approach.

But Polybius brought out the basic lesson in his reflection-'for as a ship, if you deprive it of its steersman, falls with all its crew into the hands of the enemy; so, with an army in war, if you outwit or out-manoeuvere its general, the whole will often fall into your hands'.

For there is nothing more intolerable to mankind than suspense; when a thing is once decided, men can but endure whatever out of the catalogue of evils it is their misfortune to undergo.

But Quebec is an illuminating example of the truth that a decision is produced even more by the mental and moral dislocation of the command than by the physical dislocation of its forces.