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When you come to a hill or a bank, occupy the sunny side, with the slope on your right rear. Thus you will at once act for the benefit of your soldiers and utilise the natural advantages of the ground.

And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?

[Defined as "natural pens or prisons" or "places surrounded by precipices on three sides—easy to get into, but hard to get out of."]

[Tu Mu quotes T’ai Kung as saying: "An army should have a stream or a marsh on its left, and a hill or tumulus on its right."]

A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.

[Defined as "low-lying places, so heavy with mud as to be impassable for chariots and horsemen."]

You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which, though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn gymnastics.

If you are anxious to fight, you should not go to meet the invader near a river which he has to cross.

[Chang Yu has the note: "We must also be on our guard against traitors who may lie in close covert, secretly spying out our weaknesses and overhearing our instructions."]

should be left with all possible speed and not approached.

[Ts’ao Kung says: "Make for fresh water and pasture, where you can turn out your animals to graze."]

[Tu Mu takes this to mean "facing south," and Ch’en Hao "facing east." Cf. infra, §§ 11, 13.

And the young should be trained in both kinds, and we begin with the false?

If in the neighbourhood of your camp there should be any hilly country, ponds surrounded by aquatic grass, hollow basins filled with reeds, or woods with thick undergrowth, they must be carefully routed out and searched; for these are places where men in ambush or insidious spies are likely to be lurking.

These are the four useful branches of military knowledge

In crossing salt-marshes, your sole concern should be to get over them quickly, without any delay.

[See supra, § 2. The repetition of these words in connection with water is very awkward. Chang Yu has the note: "Said either of troops marshalled on the river-bank, or of boats anchored in the stream itself; in either case it is essential to be higher than the enemy and facing the sun." The other commentators are not at all explicit.]

And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming;—your dog is a true philosopher.

Then we have found the desired natures; and now that we have found them, how are they to be reared and educated? Is not this an enquiry which may be expected to throw light on the greater enquiry which is our final end—How do justice and injustice grow up in States? for we do not want either to omit what is to the point or to draw out the argument to an inconvenient length.

These are the four useful branches of military knowledge