But I have no doubt that it is infinitely better to seek a relationship with other human beings, which the structure and discipline of a regiment makes second nature. And the magic of Christianity is that Jesus teaches us that it is permissible, with due decorum, to treat the Almighty, the Creator, as one would another human being, in order to fulfil His purposes. It is only necessary in order to act effectively to be prepared to translate the marriage of minds, which one finds in the army, into the self-discipline of civilian life, where alas one finds it all too seldom. The problem for the young is that to achieve all this, they would have to renounce “self”, at the very moment when the exuberance of youth urges them to exploit it.
Clausewitz in his treatise On War, does not prescribe Rules for fighting battles, nor Doctrines for planning campaigns, which in any event would have been out of date within a generation; he endeavours to understand the nature of war. And so teach those involved in war to understand what is happening to them, and be able the more readily to decide what to do. In other words, he seeks to train the soldier’s judgement. War is violence, and in ideal war the maximum violence is used to achieve the required objective.
He says at the very beginning of Chapter 1 of his treatise On War, that kind-hearted people might suppose that the minimum amount of force should be used, which is necessary to accomplish the objective which you hope to achieve, in the limited war in which you have decided to engage. In this way, the minimum suffering will be caused, particularly to the civilian population. But this is to misunderstand the nature of War, which is violence, even extreme violence; and he says the mistakes that come from such kindness are the very worst. It is to put the cart before the horse. Instead you should use the maximum force, which it is politically expedient to expend on the limited aim you hope to achieve. You can make no greater mistake than to misjudge the precise nature of the war, in which you have chosen to engage, or to imagine its nature is different from what it actually is. My only comment from litigation is that if you first misjudge the situation, once you are engaged in the conflict, you lose the ability to readjust to the situation in its true perspective, until you realize you have irrevocably failed to achieve your aim.
Similarly with Religion and the State; unless this world is an irrelevant dream or nightmare, and reality is entirely in a heaven or hell after death, for the citizen in the name of Religion to ignore his duty to the State is about as bad a misjudgement as it is possible for him to make. For him to imagine he can scramble into his kind of heaven, by invoking the Deity in his particular way, and expect others to maintain the Rule of Law and the safety of the State, is fantasy. It is a reversal of everything life in this world is about.