On the professional side the service is obvious, since before the last
war the weakness of the American like the British Army, a weakness
inevitable, given our isolation, lay in the absence of adequate study
of the higher branches of military science and thus the absence of
such a body of highly skilled professional soldiers, as constituted
the French or German General Staff. The present volume is a clear
evidence that American officers themselves have voluntarily undertaken
to make good this lack.

On the non-professional side and for the general reader, the service
is hardly less considerable, since it supplies the least technically
informed with a simply comprehensible explanation of things which
almost every one has struggled to grasp and visualize during the last
six years extending from the battle of Marne in 1914 to that of the
Vistula in 1920.

Of the truth of this latter assertion, a single example will perhaps
suffice. Every forthcoming military study of the campaign of 1914
emphasizes with renewed energy the fact that underlying all the German
conceptions of the opening operations was the purpose to repeat the
achievement of Hannibal at Cannae, by bringing the French to battle
under conditions which should, on a colossal scale, reproduce those of
Hannibal's greatest victory. But nowhere better than in du Picq's
volume, are set forth the essential circumstances of the combat which,
after two thousand years gave to Field Marshal von Schlieffen the root
ideas for the strategy expressed in the first six weeks of 1914. And,
as a final observation, nowhere better than in du Picq's account, can
one find the explanation of why the younger Moltke failed in executing
those plans which gave Hannibal one of the most shining triumphs in
all antiquity.