BATTLE STUDIES




A MILITARY THINKER


Near Longeville-les-Metz on the morning of August 15, 1870, a stray
projectile from a Prussian gun mortally wounded the Colonel of the
10th Regiment of the Line. The obscure gunner never knew that he had
done away with one of the most intelligent officers of our army, one
of the most forceful writers, one of the most clear-sighted
philosophers whom sovereign genius had ever created.

Ardant du Picq, according to the Annual Register, commanded but a
regiment. He was fitted for the first rank of the most exalted. He
fell at the hour when France was thrown into frightful chaos, when all
that he had foreseen, predicted and dreaded, was being terribly
fulfilled. New ideas, of which he was the unknown trustee and
unacknowledged prophet, triumphed then at our expense. The disaster
that carried with it his sincere and revivifying spirit, left in the
tomb of our decimated divisions an evidence of the necessity for
reform. When our warlike institutions were perishing from the lack of
thought, he represented in all its greatness the true type of military
thinker. The virile thought of a military thinker alone brings forth