dared and selected what were considered in those days efficient staff officers. These were persons who would make good clerks or messengers; in addition, there were always a few of the picked officers of the entire army, to whom were given small bodies of troops for important distant operations, or who were assigned to hold an important key position or to lead a decisive charge in battle. The leader himself drew up all the plans and dictated the orders down to the finest detail.

This was the system of Marlborough and Eugene; of Turenne and Conde. Frederick, with all his genius, still held to it. The splendid Winterfeld-his chief-of-staff, and after Frederick, the finest German officer of that day-was noted for his brilliant conduct in distant raids and minor operations rather than for his careful planning of campaigns and the accurate arrangements for their execution—the duties of the chief-of-staff to-day.

Napoleon, as far as the staff work was concerned, followed closely in the steps of Frederick; perhaps he was influenced by his desire to keep his system, as he called it, secret; it was bad enough to have Jomini on the staff of one of his marshals; no such prying thinkers were wanted close at hand. The emperor was justified in this desire for secrecy, for when Jomini went over to the Russians he was able to give them the most important advice as to what Napoleon might be expected to do in certain situations. Therefore we see Chief Clerk Berthier acting as chief-of-staff and the intrepid Mouton or Rapp of the twentythree wounds, leading the charges at critical moments. The small part played by Berthier is shown by the crude dispositions he made at the beginning of the 1809 campaign in Bavaria, when he commanded-in-chief for a short time, which proved, that he had learned nothing of the system of the great leader with whom he had been so intimately associated for so many years.

It is true that with his system of doing everything himself the energetic General Bonaparte accomplished wonders with his small army, but this was due to his genius and wonderful activity. When the Emperor Napoleon began to campaign with his grand army, remarkable successes were still achieved, but when the forces grew larger and larger and the energy of the master diminished, the real faults of the system came to the light. No longer was it possible for one man—even had he been able to “put on the boots and the resolution of 1793”—to handle all the details;

and unfortunately there were no other officers trained for this duty. The Russian campaign displayed error after error; chance after chance was thrown away. You may remember that during the retreat there was one time when the Russian army coming north from the war with Turkey seized the line of the Beresina and commanded all its crossings, thus completely cutting the line of retreat of Napoleon's army. The emperor, facing the worst disaster of his career, aroused himself and made one of his most beautiful moves. By a rapid march he threw a force across the river, routed the Russians and built a bridge. Half the army passed in safety, but night coming on the movement stopped, there being no staff officers present to oversee such an important march. A cavalry officer noticed that no effort was being made to complete the crossing and tried in every way to get action taken. As not staff officers could be found, he himself forced several thousand stragglers to cross. In the morning the Russians appeared in greatly superior numbers and the stragglers, who numbered about 40,000, all attempted to cross at once, fighting desperately among themselves for a passage, so that thousands were pushed off the edge of the bridge and finally the bridge broke through, causing the terrible disaster which is so famous in history. All this could have been prevented by one good staff officer with authority to superintend the passage.

Again at the battle of Leipsic the lack of a proper staff was apparent. On the third day of the battle Napoleon was suddenly given the news that practically all the artillery ammunition was exhausted; this made a retreat necessary. There was but one permanent bridge over the small river in the rear of the army and no person had thought to build the numerous other bridges which would be necessary for the retreat of an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men. In addition to this neglect a mere sergeant was left in charge of the blowing up of this bridge after the rearguard had passed. Being alarmed by the approach of a few Saxon sharpshooters, he exploded the mine while there were still 25,000 men to pass, with what serious results you may imagine.

In the Waterloo campaign-so beautifully planned and so wretchedly executed-a whole series of mistakes were committed by the staff, which probably had a deciding effect on the result of the campaign. After giving the most detailed orders for the

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first days, Napoleon gave both Ney and Grouchy-both of whom he knew to be incapable of using their own judgment on independent duty-very indefinite and unsatisfactory oral orders, so that neither had a proper understanding of his task. Later Grouchy sent an aid to Napoleon; although he arrived as the battle of Waterloo was commencing, he could get no orders for his general and was not even told that Napoleon proposed to fight a battle. I do not mean to defend Grouchy, for his mistakes were 'incomparably greater than those of Napoleon; for that matter the English were equally bad, and the Prussians none too good. I refer you to Ropes' splendid book "The Campaign of Waterloo" for a complete account of this terrible campaign; you will be pained to see the close competition between the three armies, each striving to make the worst mistakes.

When Napoleon was at St. Helena he made a very significant statement: "If I had to begin governing again I would not do precisely the same as I did then. I would look at things en masse; I would not bother myself about details." He recognized when too late the faults of his system!

I give to Scharnhorst the credit for developing the general staff idea. He was chief-of-staff to the Duke of Brunswick in the Jena campaign and had his sound advice been listened to, the complete defeat of the Prussian army might have been prevented. After the defeat of Prussia he became chief-of-staff to General Lestocq who commanded a Prussian corps in cooperation with the Russian army. His services were brilliant, the timely arrival of Lestocq's corps at Eylau giving Napoleon no more than a drawn battle where he had hoped for a decision. Later he had charge of the reorganization of the Prussian Army, and when war broke out again in 1813 he served as chief-of-staff to Marshal Blucher. He was ably assisted in his duties by Gneisenau and Muffling. Rugged old Blucher was well content to leave the planning of his operations in such efficient hands; all he claimed for himself was to be allowed to go into the thick of the fighting. Still even Scharnhorst was able to do no more than to introduce the new idea of a staff being of some real assistance to the general; unfortunately he was wounded in action and died; after that the Prussian staff work was far from brilliant. As an example, Muffling, the liaison officer with Wellington, stated before the Waterloo campaign that "the junction of the English

and Prussian armies for a defensive battle was so distinctly prescribed by circumstances and the locality that no doubt whatever could be raised on the point." You doubtless remember that there proved to be considerable doubt. Gneisenau also sent out an order to the corps commanders to concentrate without stating that hostilities were imminent. Bulow therefore marched along so leisurely that he arrived too late to take part in the battle of Ligny, a delay which had for a time a very dangerous result. However, after Blucher had been injured in a cavalry charge at Ligny, Gneisenau took the responsibility of ordering a change of base and a retreat on Wavre. This splendid move on his part made possible the march to Waterloo which decided the campaign.

After the Napoleonic wars Clausewitz developed the ideas which Scharnhorst had originated; Moltke brought them to their culmination and proved their worth in war. The general looked on things "en masse "-as Napoleon advised; the staff prepared the information necessary for the decision; the general indicated this in its broad outlines; the staff filled in the rest of the plan and issued all the orders; then it saw that they were executed, only referring to the general for decision on matters of extreme importance. All the staff officers knew the doctrine of their general and thought along the same lines. More than this, all staff officers on all staffs were members of the same organization, the general staff, and had all been trained at the same school and in accordance with the same principles. Thus there was agreement upon all important matters throughout the entire army. The Prussian Army was the first which knew the true meaning of cooperation; the results won by this knowledge are shown by history.

Shortly before his death Moltke made a memorable statement: "Our campaign and our victories have instructed the French, who, like us, have numbers, armament and courage. Our strength will be in management, in leadership, in one word, in the General Staff. This strength France may envy us. She does not possess it." It is fortunate for the world that the French took to heart this statement in which the reason for Germany's strength was so accurately depicted by her greatest soldier. The brilliant maneuvers which culminated in the splendid victory of the Marne could not have been carried out except through the agency of the French General Staff, an organization built up during twentyfive years of peace.

II. SECOND LETTER

THE SELECTION OF THE STAFF

Having traced the historical development of the principles which should govern the operation of a staff, we are now in a position to take into consideration the principles which should govern in the selection of the officers who compose the staff.

As a preliminary step it might be well to see what qualities a general or flag officer should have and how he should be selected by the supreme command. I therefore beg your indulgence for giving you a few of my ideas on this subject. Napoleon was fond of saying: "In war men are nothing, one man is everything." While his idea is expressed in rather a Napoleonic-that is, exaggerated-manner, I think you will agree with it.

As one looks back on history, he can see that the greatest of leaders combined brilliant intelligence with extraordinary courage. They conceived the grandest combinations and carried them through to a successful conclusion with utter fearlessness. See how Alexander conceived his stupendous design of conquering the world with 40,000 men and did it by marching 22,000 miles in eleven years an average of over six miles a day for this period! Look at Hannibal carrying out the grandest conception in military history, marching from Spain to Italy through an absolutely unknown country and advancing into the plains of Italy with 26,000 men against the first military nation of the world, which carried no less than 700,000 able-bodied men on its rolls!

But it is very seldom that such great brilliance and such strength of character are combined in one man. We cannot afford to wait for the arrival of such a man, for there are not more than one or two in a century. What then is the one most important quality for a general or flag officer to have? I often think of how much we lose by not taking advantage of the learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Perhaps you do not know that the careful historian Myers gives his opinion that the average Athenian possessed as wide an intellectual knowledge as the average member of the British Parliament to-day. The opinions of the Greeks are then of such a value that some cognizance should be taken of them. I will offer you two selections from Thucydides which bear on the subject we are now considering. The first comes from the Corinthians: "The execution of an enterprise is never