We shall learn from them to distrust mathematics and material dynamics
as applied to battle principles. We shall learn to beware of the
illusions drawn from the range and the maneuver field.

There, experience is with the calm, settled, unfatigued, attentive,
obedient soldier, with an intelligent and tractable man-instrument in
short, and not with the nervous, easily swayed, moved, troubled,
distrait, excited, restless being, not even under self-control, who is
the fighting man from general to private. There are strong men,
exceptions, but they are rare.

These illusions, nevertheless, stubborn and persistent, always repair
the very next day the most damaging injuries inflicted on them by
experience. Their least dangerous effect is to lead to prescribing the
impractical, as if ordering the impractical were not really an attack
on discipline, and did not result in disconcerting officers and men by
the unexpected and by surprise at the contrast between battle and the
theories of peacetime training.

Battle, of course, always furnishes surprises. But it furnishes less
in proportion as good sense and the recognition of truth have had
their effect on the training of the fighting man, and are disseminated
in the ranks. Let us then study man in battle, for it is he who really
fights.




CHAPTER I