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**Shek** · 05-02-2007, 11:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Swift Sword

Clausewitz, OTOH, can be a beast to the uninitiated or otherwise faint of heart.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BigFella

'Maybe that's why I've never actually read the full text of "On War" ,' - Shek

Shek, I had to laugh when I read this. There are some authors (a great many of them German) who just weren't made to be read in full. I remember asking an acquaintance of mine who was/is a hardcore Marxist how the hell he waded through the interminable turgid prose of 'Das Kapital' and related paperweights. He confessed "we didn't - we just read the dirty bits".

This quote from Michael Howard's essay "The Influence of Clausewitz" jumped out at me on this topic.

Quote:

When Clausewitz's widow published On War in 1832 a year after her husband's death, it was received with a respect which may have owed more to Clausewitz's reputation as one of the great generation of Prussian military reformers, a pupil of Scharnhorst and a close colleague of Gneisenau, than to any deep or widespread study of its contents. "The streams whose crystal floods pour over nuggets of pure gold," warned one tactful reviewer, "do not flow in any flat and accessible river bed but in a narrow rocky valley surrounded by gigantic Ideas, and over its entrance the mighty Spirit stands guard like a cherub with his sword, turning back all who expect to be admitted at the usual price for a play of ideas." In other words, he found it heavy going, and he was clearly not the only reader to do so.