Thanks a million, Wilfried. Another triumph for Mudcat, solving one of those questions which have been at the back of my mind for decades!

It looks as if either the translation which I have is very free, or else my attention span is much worse than I thought: I don't know how I missed it, given that tracking down this statement is one of the reasons why I bought the book.

I should explain that we never had compulsory military service in Ireland, but for a long time I was a volunteer member of the volunteer territorial reserve. Hence my interest in military theory. I have also, since my schooldays, tried to defend Germany and "the Germans" against the kind of stupid prejudice that was propagated by British boys' comic books of the 1950s before they were entirely taken over by football. Believe it or not, that attempt at objectivity earned me the nickname "Hitler", which followed me throughout my childhood - and that was in "neutral" Ireland! The misguided belief that Clausewitz's dictum is no more than the expression of cynical Prussian militarism is the adult equivalent of the same prejudice, which is also still actively stoked up by the British tabloids, sometimes under the pretext of commenting on football (spot the connection?).

Your translation is fine. "Verkehr" could be translated by "intercourse" in a text of this era, but in modern usage that word is almost totally confined to the sexual domain. "Relations" would be another possible translation. One of the great dilemmas for translators working from German or French to English is to decide whether to translate Politik/politique as "politics" or "policy". Either would seem justified if Clausewitz's heading stood alone as an aphorism, but I think you have made the right choice here, given the way he develops his point.