ideas on the lines of operations, on strategic manoeuvres [les mouvements stra-
te ́giques], and principally on the systems of battle’. Lloyd convinced Jomini of
something he had not previously appreciated: ‘he demonstrated to me that the
operations of war were able to be reduced to simple and definitive principles’. 10
The effect of simplicity and definition was to endow ‘operations’ with a
pregnancy rejected by Clausewitz (who, it must be remembered, wroteOn War
after Jomini had published theTraite ́, even if the latter’sPre ́cis de l’art de la guerre
(1838) was then able to respond to Clausewitz after the Prussian’s death in 1831).
Jomini’s chapter defining ‘lines of operations when considered as manoeuvre’
furnished the launching pad for something much more ambitious. He provided a
classification of the lines of operations—simple, double, and multiple, interior
and exterior; he distinguished between lines of operations on an extended front
and deep lines of operations, between concentric and eccentric (or divergent)
lines of operations, and between secondary and accidental lines of operations. 11
Jomini’sTraite ́, and its successor volumes, bothTableau analytique des princi-
pales combinaisons de la guerre, et de leurs rapports avec la polititique des e ́tats
(1830) andPre ́cis de l’art de la guerre, which were designed to encapsulate the
essence of the original argument by reversing the structure (i.e. by putting the
theoretical conclusions first, and then using history solely as an exemplary
illustration), were the founding documents of ‘operational art’ as understood
by the armies of Europe in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. And yet
at one level they were not, because Jomini saw his subject not as an art but as a
science; he preferred the word ‘dogma’, not doctrine. 12
That certainty, the reduction of the conduct of operations to maxims and
principles, ensured him an audience which broke the bounds of language (if
writing in French in the early nineteenth century was any obstacle to universal
comprehension) and even of strategic culture. Britain may have been primarily a
naval power, secure or relatively so in its island status, but that did not prevent
British soldiers from internalizing Jominian precepts. The first great British
military historian, General Sir William Napier, himself a veteran of the Napo-
leonic Wars, reviewed theTraite ́in generous terms for theEdinburgh Reviewin
1821 and referred to it in hismagnum opus, theHistory of the War in the Peninsula
and the South of France. 13
Napier’s own interests and focus were predominantly tactical, and in this he
was representative of most of the British army up to the Crimean War and even
thereafter. TheAide-Me ́moire to the Military Sciences, published by a committee
of officers from the Royal Engineers in three bulky volumes between 1846 and
1852, contained no entry under ‘strategy’ or—for that matter—‘operations’, but
cited Jomini extensively in its article on the ‘tactics of the three arms’. However,
the first volume began with an introductory essay to the whole entitled ‘Sketch of
the Science and Art of War’, by Lieutenant Colonel C. Hamilton Smith. Drawing
heavily on Jomini, Hamilton Smith divided his subject matter into ‘strategics’
and ‘tactics’, and under the former heading dealt with ‘offensive operations’
(at length) and ‘defensive operations’ (more briefly). His categorization of lines
of operations was that presented by Jomini in theTraite ́, but Hamilton Smith
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 99