a desire to get to the root of the matter. This explains the
unremitting eagerness of military writers to extol the special
qualities developed by long-continued service habits and methods.
They are always apprehensive of the possibility of credit being
given to fighting bodies more loosely organised and less precisely
trained in peace time than the body to which they themselves
belong.

This sensitiveness as to the merits of their particular profession,
and impatience of even indirect criticism, are unnecessary. There
is nothing in the history of war to show that an untrained force
is better than a trained force. On the contrary, all historical
evidence is on the other side. In quite as many instances as are
presented by the opposite, the forces which put an unexpected
end to the military supremacy long possessed by their antagonists
were themselves, in the strictest sense of the word, 'regulars.'
The Thebans whom Epaminondas led to victory over the Spartans at
Leuctra no more resembled a hasty levy of armed peasants or men
imperfectly trained as soldiers than did Napoleon's army which
overthrew the Prussians at Jena, or the Germans who defeated the
French at Gravelotte and Sedan. Nothing could have been less like
an 'irregular' force than the fleet with which La Galissonnière
beat Byng off Minorca, or the French fleets which, in the war
of American Independence, so often disappointed the hopes of
the British. The records of war on land and by sea--especially
the extracts from them included in the enumeration already
given--lend no support to the silly suggestion that efficient
defence can be provided for a country by 'an untrained man with
a rifle behind a hedge.' The truth is that it was not the absence
of organisation or training on one side which enabled it to defeat