2 pieces from Art of War — each retold in modern English and traced to its source.
The hardest thing in war is to make the crooked road the short one — to turn a march into an ambush, a delay into an advantage. Here is the chapter of the famous lines: swift as the wind, still as a forest, raiding like fire, unshakable as a mountain.
War is the most expensive thing a state can do — a thousand chariots, a hundred thousand mailed men, gold pouring out by the day. So Sun Tzu’s second lesson is brutal arithmetic: win fast or not at all, feed your army off the enemy, and never mistake a long war for a glorious one.