War & Peace Quote by John Desmond Bernal

War, in Bernal's hands, becomes a systems diagram. The sentence is cool, almost bloodless, and that chill is the point: he wants you to see that victory is less a matter of heroic momentum than of infrastructure that can keep up with momentum. The “rapid advance” sounds like triumph; “disorganized” punctures it. Progress creates its own mess. The temporary halt isn’t failure, it’s the hidden price of speed.

Bernal was a scientist with a planner’s imagination, and the phrasing reads like wartime operations research: communications as the nervous system of a force in motion. He’s not talking only about radios and runners. He’s describing coordination itself: the capacity to know where you are, what you have, who can do what next. When that collapses, the army doesn’t just lose information; it loses coherence. The subtext is anti-romantic: modern power depends on logistics, signals, and feedback loops, not the romance of the charge.

Context matters here. Writing in the shadow of industrialized war, Bernal understood that modern conflict (and modern institutions) are won by those who manage complexity under pressure. His “essentially” is doing rhetorical work, insisting the reader treat communications not as a support function but as the central constraint. The line doubles as a warning to anyone intoxicated by acceleration: you can outrun your own ability to coordinate, and then the pause arrives like physics, not politics.