Carl von Clausewitz: A Private Life

1831, Breslau

The city is not disordered because carts move badly in the dawn or because the stairwells carry the smell of sickness before the church bells begin. A city remains a city while its offices continue, while seals are pressed into wax, while instructions pass from one room to another and are recognised as binding. Breslau has not ceased. Men mistake affliction for rupture because they look first at bodies and only afterward at institutions. That is the common error. The physicians hurry through corridors as though haste were authority, clerks copy notices for quarantine as though repetition were mastery, and the household servants lower their voices when they speak outside my door, yet the movement of these parts confirms what panic denies. Structure persists. I write at a table covered in drafts, notes, fragments of campaigns and arguments unfinished, and although the hand chills more quickly now and the breath shortens in ways I do not welcome, the work is not endangered by illness alone. It is endangered by the certainty that others, if left to arrange it, will preserve the conclusions and discard the necessity beneath them, as though a state, or a war, or a thought could continue by virtue of having once been established. They will be wrong. They will also behave as if they cannot be wrong, which is why this account must be forced into sequence before the day claims me again.