In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when War turned very much upon sieges, it was a frequent aim, and quite a peculiar and important chapter in the Art of War, to invest a strong place unexpectedly, but even that only rarely succeeded.( *) (*) Railways, steamships, and telegraphs have, however, enormously modified the relative importance and practicability of surprise.

(EDITOR.) On the other hand, with things which can be done in a day or two, a surprise is much more conceivable, and, therefore, also it is often not difficult thus to gain a march upon the enemy, and thereby a position, a point of country, a road, &c.

But it is evident that what surprise gains in this way in easy execution, it loses in the efficacy, as the greater the efficacy the greater always the difficulty of execution.

Whoever thinks that with such surprises on a small scale, he may connect great results--as, for example, the gain of a battle, the capture of an important magazine--believes in something which it is certainly very possible to imagine, but for which there is no warrant in history; for there are upon the whole very few instances where anything great has resulted from such surprises; from which we may justly conclude that inherent difficulties lie in the way of their success.
Certainly, whoever would consult history on such points must not depend on sundry battle steeds of historical critics, on their wise dicta and self-complacent terminology, but look at facts with his own eyes.

There is, for instance, a certain day in the campaign in Silesia, 1761, which, in this respect, has attained a kind of notoriety.