But such a war does not fit in under any rule and is directly opposed to a well-known rule of tactics which is accepted as infallible. That rule says that an attacker should concentrate his forces in order to be stronger than his opponent at the moment of conflict. This contradiction arises from the fact that military science assumes the strength of an army to be identical with its numbers. Military science says that the more troops the greater the strength. Les gros bataillons ont toujours raison.
Large battalions are always victorious.
In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and some unknown x. Military science, seeing in history innumerable instances of the fact that the size of any army does not coincide with its strength and that small detachments defeat larger ones, obscurely admits the existence of this unknown factor and tries to discover it- now in a geometric formation, now in the equipment employed, now, and most usually, in the genius of the commanders. But the assignment of these various meanings to the factor does not yield results which accord with the historic facts. Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting. The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force. Only then, expressing known historic facts by equations and comparing the relative significance of this factor, can we hope to define the unknown.