The fault of the military man is that he studies too much, reads too
much history, is over reflective. If, instead, he would look about
him more he would notice that things are changing. Someone has told
the British military man that Waterloo was won upon the playing
fields of Eton. So he goes to Eton and plays. One of these days he
will be called upon to fight another Waterloo: and afterwards--when
it is too late--they will explain to him that it was won not upon the
play field but in the class room.

From the mound on the old Waterloo plain one can form a notion of
what battles, under former conditions, must have been. The other
battlefields of Europe are rapidly disappearing: useful Dutch
cabbages, as Carlyle would have pointed out with justifiable
satisfaction, hiding the theatre of man's childish folly. You find,
generally speaking, cobblers happily employed in cobbling shoes,
women gossipping cheerfully over the washtub on the spot where a
hundred years ago, according to the guide-book, a thousand men
dressed in blue and a thousand men dressed in red rushed together
like quarrelsome fox-terriers, and worried each other to death.

But the field of Waterloo is little changed. The guide, whose
grandfather was present at the battle--quite an extraordinary number
of grandfathers must have fought at Waterloo: there must have been
whole regiments composed of grandfathers--can point out to you the
ground across which every charge was delivered, can show you every
ridge, still existing, behind which the infantry crouched. The whole
business was began and finished within a space little larger than a
square mile. One can understand the advantage then to be derived
from the perfect moving of the military machine; the uses of the