Chapter 69

The chapter opens by quoting military people rather than speaking in its own voice: there is a saying among those who use arms. What follows is a preference for the defensive position stated in the idiom of hospitality. I would rather be the guest than the host, and rather retreat a foot than advance an inch.

The metaphor is worth keeping. A host has prepared, has committed his household and has to see the occasion through; a guest arrives, observes and can leave. Applied to a campaign it means declining to be the party that initiates, and the second clause makes the asymmetry explicit by trading a large withdrawal for a small advance.

Then four paradoxes describing what such a war looks like: marching without marching, rolling up a sleeve with no arm bared, seizing without a weapon, advancing where there is no enemy. Each names an act of aggression with its content removed, and the last is the summary. The ideal engagement is one where the opposing force is not there to be met, which is the same claim chapter sixty-eight makes when it says the one who is good at overcoming the enemy does not engage him.

The chapter then names the fatal error, and it is not cowardice. There is no calamity greater than taking the enemy lightly, and taking the enemy lightly nearly costs me my treasures. Those are the three treasures of chapter sixty-seven, which makes the two chapters continuous: contempt for an opponent destroys compassion, thrift and restraint together.

The last line of the chapter is one of the strangest sentences in the book. When two forces meet and are matched, the one that grieves for it wins.

Read as tactics it makes a defensible claim. An army that regards the fight as a disaster is an army that has not talked itself into it, that has exhausted the alternatives, and that is fighting because it must, which is the condition chapter thirty sets when it says a good general acts because there was no choice. Troops in that position are defending something, and the side that has convinced itself the war is glorious is the side more likely to have miscalculated.

Read against chapter thirty-one it is more than tactics. That chapter requires a victory to be conducted with funeral rites and says a person who delights in killing will not get his way in the world. This chapter says the same thing as a prediction about outcomes: grief is not merely the proper response afterwards, it is the disposition that decides the engagement.

The two readings are not rivals, and the book habitually offers a moral position in the form of a prediction. What it almost never does is say that a good outcome is deserved. It says the violent do not die a natural death, that a thing which grows strong grows old, and here that the mourning side wins, and each is stated as how things go rather than as how they should.

The specific verb has also been read as compassion rather than grief, which gives the line as its subject the side that pities, and connects it directly to the first of the three treasures.