Splendor of arms,
of banners, of equipages, of ceremonies, and the elaborate forms of
intercourse with enemies through conferences, armistices, treaties of
peace, &c., having tamed the savagery of war into connection with modes
of intellectual grandeur, and with the endless restraints of
superstition or scrupulous religion,--a permanent light of civilization
began to steal over the bloody shambles of buccaneering warfare. Other
modes of harmonizing influences arose more directly from the bosom of
war itself. Gradually the mere practice of war, and the culture of war
though merely viewed as a rude trade of bloodshed, ripened into an
intellectual art. Were it merely with a view to more effectual carnage,
this art (however simple and gross at first) opened at length into wide
scientific arts, into strategies, into tactics, into castrametation,
into poliorcetics, and all the processes through which the first rude
efforts of martial cunning finally connect themselves with the
exquisite resources of science. War, being a game in which each side
forces the other into the instant adoption of all improvements through
the mere necessities of self-preservation, became continually more
intellectual.
It is interesting to observe the steps by which, were it only through
impulses of self-conservation, and when searching with a view to more
effectual destructiveness, war did and must refine itself from a horrid
trade of butchery into a magnificent and enlightened science.
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