a livelier game.

Our next step was to abolish the tedium due to the elaborate aiming of
the guns, by fixing a time limit for every move. We made this an outside
limit at first, ten minutes, but afterwards we discovered that it made
the game much more warlike to cut the time down to a length that would
barely permit a slow-moving player to fire all his guns and move all his
men. This led to small bodies of men lagging and "getting left," to
careless exposures, to rapid, less accurate shooting, and just that
eventfulness one would expect in the hurry and passion of real fighting.
It also made the game brisker. We have since also made a limit,
sometimes of four minutes, sometimes of five minutes, to the interval
for adjustment and deliberation after one move is finished and before
the next move begins. This further removes the game from the chess
category, and approximates it to the likeness of active service. Most of
a general's decisions, once a fight has begun, must be made in such
brief intervals of time. (But we leave unlimited time at the outset for
the planning.)

As to our time-keeping, we catch a visitor with a stop-watch if we can,
and if we cannot, we use a fair-sized clock with a second-hand: the
player not moving says "Go," and warns at the last two minutes, last
minute, and last thirty seconds. But I think it would not be difficult
to procure a cheap clock--because, of course, no one wants a very
accurate agreement with Greenwich as to the length of a second--that
would have minutes instead of hours and seconds instead of minutes, and
that would ping at the end of every minute and discharge an alarm note
at the end of the move. That would abolish the rather boring strain of
time-keeping. One could just watch the fighting.