Give him time to _breathe_,--and above all, give him time to _rest_, and your project is blasted; his forages will be completed, and his magazines filled and secured.

The roads of approach will be obstructed, bridges destroyed, and strong points everywhere taken and defended.

You will, in fact, like Burgoyne, in 1777, reduce yourself to the necessity of bleeding at every step, without equivalent or use." "Such cannot be the fate of a commander who, knowing all the value of acting on the offensive, shakes, by the vigor and address of his first movements, the moral as well as physical force of his enemy,--who, selecting his own time, and place, and mode of attack, confounds his antagonist by enterprises equally hardy and unexpected,--and who at last leaves to him only the alternative of resistance without hope, or of flying without resistance." The British army, in the war of the American Revolution, must have been most wretchedly ignorant of these leading maxims for conducting offensive war.

Instead of concentrating their forces on some decisive point, and then destroying the main body of our army by repeated and well-directed blows, they scattered their forces over an immense extent of country, and became too weak to act with decision and effect on any one point.

On the other hand, this policy enabled us to call out and discipline our scattered and ill-provided forces.
The main object in _defensive_ war is, to protect the menaced territory, to retard the enemy's progress, to multiply obstacles in his way, to guard the vital points of the country, and--at the favorable moment, when the enemy becomes enfeebled by detachments, losses, privations, and fatigue--to assume the offensive, and drive him from the country.