War’s “grammar,” Clausewitz writes in On War, “may be its own, but not its logic.”10 With training, discipline, and superior leadership, armies can suspend temporarily the all-too-human instinct to flee from danger: combat, as Clausewitz’s novice discovers, defies common sense. In time, though, logic surrounds, confounds, and supersedes such grammar. Heroics drain you. Offensives slow as supply lines lengthen. Retreats invite counterattack. Russia is big and its winters are cold. Dogs that catch cars never know what to do with them. Why, then, did Napoleon forget what most fools remember?
