their copies of the regulation tactics, officers supplied themselves
with such manuals as Mahan's books on Field Fortifications and on
Outpost Duty. I adopted at the beginning a rule to have some
military work in course of reading, and kept it up even in the
field, sending home one volume and getting another by mail. In this
way I gradually went through all the leading books I could find both
in English and in French, including the whole of Jomini's works, his
histories as well as his "Napoleon" and his "Grandes Operations
Militaires." I know of no intellectual stimulus so valuable to the
soldier as the reading of military history narrated by an
acknowledged master in the art of war. To see what others have done
in important junctures, and to have both their merits and their
mistakes analyzed by a competent critic, rouses one's mind to
grapple with the problem before it, and begets a generous
determination to try to rival in one's own sphere of action the
brilliant deeds of soldiers who have made a name in other times.
Then the example of the vigorous way in which history will at last
deal with those who fail when the pinch comes, tends to keep a man
up to his work and to make him avoid the rock on which so many have
split, the disposition to take refuge in doing nothing when he finds
it difficult to decide what should be done.

The first fortnight in camp was the hardest for the troops. The
ploughed fields became deep with mud, which nothing could remove but
the good weather which should allow them to pack hard under the
continued tramp of thousands of men. The organization of the camp
kitchens had to be learned by the hardest also, and the men in each
company who had some aptitude for cooking had to be found by a slow
process of natural selection, during which many an unpalatable meal
had to be eaten. A disagreeable bit of information came to us in the