"By considering a few of Clausewitz's statements in isolation and christening him the "Mahdi of Mass," Basil Liddell Hart portrayed him as an intellectual forerunner of the commanders of the First World War, who for three-and-a-half years found no way out of the stalemate of the Western front, with its hundreds and thousands of casualties each week. For having stated that war was merely the continuation of policy by other means, Clausewitz was charged with minimising differences between peace and war, and thus making war more acceptable. But that accusation was based on a misunderstanding of the larger theoretical purpose of this definition: to identify political decisions as the common cause of war, which—if the leadership was rational—should also determine the degree of violence needed to achieve the political purpose. This misinterpretation fed into the view held by John Keegan, among others, that Clausewitz saw nothing morally reprehensible in war, and that his theories contributed to the boundless violence of the world wars and their ancillary conflicts in the twentieth century. To misread Clausewitz, and then ascribe to his ideas a greater influence than the world's actual experience with Napoleonic war, the vast expansion of armed forces throughout the nineteenth century, industrialisation, modern technology, and new ideologies, is, however, to fail to distinguish between historical events and their analyst."