face and eye: caesar as clausewitzian and jominian
The grunt's-eye-view, surrounded by chaos and death, captures something different from the general's-eye-view, atop a hill, distant from the killing zone. Nevertheless, many generals have fought side-by-side with their men, and Caesar was apparently one of these.
But even if every warrior, including the general, risks their lives in battle, only the military commanders decide how to organize the whole military force. As general, should you have a detailed plan, factoring in every variable you can think of, branching as the battle goes this way or that? or do you set only very broad objectives beforehand and respond actively as the situation changes on the ground? and as a general do you think of every contingency yourself, or do you rely on trusted subordinates (officers, we'd call them today) to make good decisions, taking advantage of the more-first-hand knowledge they have of their particular part of the battlefield?
Two modern theorists are often taken as representative of two major schools of thought on this problem. The first, and better-known, is Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), who is probably most famous for his dictum that 'war is the continuation of politics by other means'. (He had a lot of pithy aphorisms, and they fit together remarkably well -- at least if you take his philosophy of war seriously.) He fought in the Prussian army against Napoleon and was taken prisoner at the Battle of Jena (1806 -- a major victory for Napoleon, probably the single battle that most gave him control over the continent), and the loss deeply influenced his military theory (but it is hard to blame anyone for losing against Napoleon during the Jena campaign!). Clausewitz' great work On War (Vom Kriege) (published in posthumously in 1832) treats war not as an intelligible mechanism but rather as the interplay of two irrational and one partially rational force: rage, chance, and subordination. On War spends a good deal of time directly attacking more rationalist pictures of war as both impractical (no diagram applies in real life!) and philosophically erroneous (diagrams do not capture the psychological or moral element, which is (says Clausewitz) by far the most important).
The second theorist, no longer as widely known but perhaps equally influential, is Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779-1869), whose approach (more than Clausewitz') resembles a war game. He fought with Napoleon (including Jena), although the only sources that claim close association between Jomini and Napoleon were written by Jomini himself; and after Napoleon's (disastrously failed) invasion of Russia, and then again after some internal politics, Jomini joined the Russian army (!). His work on The Art of War (Précis de l'Art de la Guerre), read by most military commanders of the day and taught in many military academies (including West Point), takes an approach nearly the opposite of von Clausewitz': for Jomini, war is thoroughly intelligible, almost mathematical, and his work is filled with diagram after simplifying diagram.
TO DO
As you read the opening of Caesar's Gallic War, look for places where he treats war like a diagram, where he notes and interprets geographical and topographical details, how he paints the psychological and moral characters of the inhabitants of Gaul, and how he combines the physical and the moral to describe the land and peoples that he is about to conquer. Use hypothes.is comments to tag passages where you see Caesar taking each of these approaches in the text below.
(NB: make sure you complete the additional mini-assignments linked in the text below.)