There are plenty of carefree generals, who are never worried nor harassed. They do not bother about anything. They say, "I advance. Follow me." The result is an incredible disorder in the advance of columns. If ten raiders should fall on the column with a shout, this disorder would become a rout, a disaster. But these gentlemen never bother with such an eventuality. They are the great men of the day, until the moment that some disaster overwhelms them.

Cavalry is no more difficult to work with than infantry. According to some military authors, a cavalry general ought to have the wisdom of the phoenix. The perfect one should have. So should the perfect infantry general. Man on horseback and man afoot is always the same man. Only, the infantry general rarely has to account for the losses in his command, which may have been due to faulty or improper handling. The cavalry general does have to do this. (We shall lay aside the reasons why.) The infantry general has six chances for real battle to one for the cavalry general. These are the two reasons why, from the beginning of a war, more initiative is found in infantry than in cavalry generals. General Bugeaud might have made a better cavalry general than an infantry general. Why? Because he had immediate decision and firm resolution. There is more need for resolution in the infantryman than in the cavalryman. Why? There are many reasons, which are matters of opinion.

In short, the infantryman is always more tired than the cavalryman. His morale is therefore harder to keep up. I believe therefore that a good infantry general is rarer than one of cavalry. Also, the resolution of an infantry general does not have to last for a moment only; it has to endure for a long, long time.

Good artillery generals are common. They are less concerned with morale than with other things, such as material results. They have less need to bother about the morale of their troops, as combat discipline is always better with them than with the other arms. This is shown elsewhere.

Brigadier generals ought to be in their prescribed places. Very well, but the most of them are not and never have been. They were required to be in place at the battle of Moscow, but, as they were so ordered there, it is evident that they were not habitually in place. They are men; and their rank, it seems to them, ought to diminish rather than increase the risks they have to run. And, then, in actual engagement, where is their prescribed place?

When one occupies a high command there are many things which he does not see. The general-in-chief, even a division commander, can only escape this failing by great activity, moved by strict conscientiousness and aided by clairvoyance. This failing extends to those about him, to his heads of services. These men live well, sleep well; the same must be true of all! They have picked, well-conditioned horses; the roads are excellent! They are never sick; the doctors must be exaggerating sickness! They have attendants and doctors; everybody must be well looked after! Something happens which shows abominable negligence, common enough in war. With a good heart and a full belly they say, "But this is infamous, unheard of! It could not have happened! It is impossible! etc."

To-day there is a tendency, whose cause should be sought, on the part of superiors to infringe on the authority of inferiors. This is general. It goes very high and is furthered by the mania for command, inherent in the French character. It results in lessening the authority of subordinate officers in the minds of their soldiers. This is a grave matter, as only the firm authority and prestige of subordinate officers can maintain discipline. The tendency is to oppress subordinates; to want to impose on them, in all things, the views of the superior; not to admit of honest mistakes, and to reprove them as faults; to make everybody, even down to the private, feel that there is only one infallible authority. A colonel, for instance, sets himself up as the sole authority with judgment and intelligence. He thus takes all initiative from subordinate officers, and reduces them to a state of inertia, coming from their lack of confidence in themselves and from fear of being severely reproved. How many generals, before a regiment, think only of showing how much they know! They lessen the authority of the colonel. That is nothing to them. They have asserted their superiority, true or false; that is the essential. With cheeks puffed out, they leave, proud of having attacked discipline.

This firm hand which directs so many things is absent for a moment. All subordinate officers up to this moment have been held with too strong a hand, which has kept them in a position not natural to them. Immediately they are like a horse, always kept on a tight rein, whose rein is loosened or missing. They cannot in an instant recover that confidence in themselves, that has been painstakingly taken away from them without their wishing it. Thus, in such a moment conditions become unsatisfactory, the soldier very quickly feels that the hand that holds him vacillates.

"Ask much, in order to obtain a little," is a false saying, a source of errors, an attack on discipline. One ought to obtain what one asks. It is only necessary to be moderately reasonable and practical.

In following out this matter, one is astonished at the lack of foresight found in three out of four officers. Why? Is there anything so difficult about looking forward a little? Are three-quarters of the officers so stupid? No! It is because their egoism, generally frankly acknowledged, allow them to think only of who is looking at them. They think of their troops by chance perhaps, or because they have to. Their troops are never their preoccupation, consequently they do not think about them at all. A major in command of an organization in Mexico, on his first march in a hot country, started without full canteens, perhaps without canteens at all, without any provision for water, as he might march in France. No officer in his battalion called his attention to the omission, nor was more foresighted than he. In this first march, by an entire lack of foresight in everything, he lost, in dead, half of his command. Was he reduced? No! He was made a lieutenant-colonel.

Officers of the general staff learn to order, not to command. "Sir, I order," a popular phrase, applies to them.

The misfortune is not that there is a general staff, but that it has achieved command. For it always has commanded, in the name of its commanders it is true, and never obeyed, which is its duty. It commands in fact. So be it! But just the same it is not supposed to.

Is it the good quality of staffs or that of combatants that makes the strength of armies? If you want good fighting men, do everything to excite their ambition, to spare them, so that people of intelligence and with a future will not despise the line but will elect to serve in it. It is the line that gives you your high command, the line only, and very rarely the staff. The staff, however, dies infrequently, which is something. Do they say that military science can only be learned in the general staff schools? If you really want to learn to do your work, go to the line.

To-day, nobody knows anything unless he knows how to argue and chatter. A peasant knows nothing, he is a being unskilled even in cultivating the soil. But the agriculturist of the office is a farmer emeritus, etc. Is it then believed that there is ability only in the general staff? There is the assurance of the scholar there, of the pedagogue who has never practiced what he preaches. There is book learning, false learning when it treats of military matters. But knowledge of the real trade of a soldier, knowledge of what is possible, knowledge of blows given and received, all these are conspicuously absent.

Slowness of promotion in the general staff as compared to its rapidity in the line might make many men of intelligence, of head and heart, pass the general staff by and enter the line to make their own way. To be in the line would not then be a brevet of imbecility. But to-day when general staff officers rank the best of the line, the latter are discouraged and rather than submit to this situation, all who feel themselves fitted for advancement want to be on the general staff. So much the better? So much the worse. Selection is only warranted by battle.

How administrative deceits, in politics or elsewhere, falsify the conclusions drawn from a fact!

In the Crimea one hundred per cent. of the French operated upon succumbed, while only twenty-seven per cent. of the English operated upon died. That was attributed to the difference in temperament! The great cause of this discrepancy was the difference in care. Our newspapers followed the self-satisfied and rosy statements given out by our own supply department. They pictured our sick in the Crimea lying in beds and cared for by sisters of charity. The fact is that our soldiers never had sheets, nor mattresses, nor the necessary changes of clothes in the hospitals; that half, three-quarters, lay on mouldy straw, on the ground, under canvass. The fact is, that such were the conditions under which typhus claimed twenty-five to thirty thousand of our sick after the siege; that thousands of pieces of hospital equipment were offered by the English to our Quartermaster General, and that he refused them! Everybody ought to have known that he would! To accept such equipment was to acknowledge that he did not have it. And he ought to have had it. Indeed he did according to the newspapers and the Quartermaster reports. There were twenty-five beds per hospital so that it could be said, "We have beds!" Each hospital had at this time five hundred or more sick.

These people are annoyed if they are called hypocrites. While our soldiers were in hospitals, without anything, so to speak, the English had big, well-ventilated tents, cots, sheets, even night stands with urinals. And our men had not even a cup to drink from! Sick men were cared for in the English hospitals. They might have been in ours, before they died, which they almost always did.

It is true that we had the typhus and the English had not. That was because our men in tents had the same care as in our hospitals, and the English the same care as in their hospitals.

Read the war reports of supply departments and then go unexpectedly to verify them in the hospitals and storehouses. Have them verified by calling up and questioning the heads of departments, but question them conscientiously, without dictating the answers. In the Crimea, in May of the first year, we were no better off than the English who complained so much, Who has dared to say, however, that from the time they entered the hospital to the time that they left it, dead, evacuated, or cured, through fifteen or twenty days of cholera or typhus, our men lay on the same plank, in the same shoes, drawers, shirts and clothing that they brought in with them? They were in a state of living putrefaction that would by itself have killed well men! The newspapers chanted the praises of the admirable French administration. The second winter the English had no sick, a smaller percentage than in London. But to the eternal shame of the French command and administration we lost in peace time, twenty-five to thirty thousand of typhus and more than one thousand frozen to death. Nevertheless, it appeared that we had the most perfect administration in the world, and that our generals, no less than our administration, were full of devoted solicitude to provide all the needs of the soldier. That is an infamous lie, and is known as such, let us hope.

The Americans have given us a good example. The good citizens have gone themselves to see how their soldiers were treated and have provided for them themselves. When, in France, will good citizens lose faith in this best of administrations which is theirs? When will they, confident in themselves, do spontaneously, freely, what their administration cannot and never will be able to do?

The first thing disorganized in an army is the administration. The simplest foresight, the least signs even of order disappear in a retreat. (Note Russia-Vilna).

In the Crimea, and everywhere more or less, the doctor's visit was without benefit to the patient. It was made to keep up his spirits, but could not be followed by care, due to lack of personnel and material. After two or three hours of work, the doctor was exhausted.

In a sane country the field and permanent hospitals ought to be able to handle one-fifth of the strength at least. The hospital personnel of to-day should be doubled. It is quickly cut down, and it ought to have time, not only to visit the sick, but to care for them, feed them, dose and dress them, etc.