Battle Studies | Page 2

and in the heat of action is more instructive than all the Thiers and
the Jominis in the world." Compare this with Foch explaining to his
friend André de Mariecourt, his own emotions at the critical hour at
Fère Champenoise, when he had to invent something new to beguile
soldiers who had retreated for weeks and been beaten for days. His
tactical problem remained unchanged, but he must give his soldiers,
tired with being beaten to the "old tune" a new air, which would appeal
to them as new, something to which they had not been beaten, and the
same philosophy appears.

Du Picq's contemporaries neglected his warning, they saw only the
outward circumstances of the Napoleonic and Frederican successes. In
vain du Picq warned them that the victories of Frederick were not the
logical outgrowth of the minutiae of the Potsdam parades. But du Picq
dead, the Third Empire fallen, France prostrated but not annihilated by
the defeats of 1870, a new generation emerged, of which Foch was but
the last and most shining example. And this generation went back,
powerfully aided by the words of du Picq, to that older tradition, to the
immutable principles of war.
With surprising exactness du Picq, speaking in the abstract, foretold an
engagement in which the mistakes of the enemy would be
counterbalanced by their energy in the face of French passivity, lack of
any control conception. Forty years later in the École de Guerre, Foch
explained the reasons why the strategy of Moltke, mistaken in all
respects, failed to meet the ruin it deserved, only because at Gravelotte
Bazaine could not make up his mind, solely because of the absence in
French High Command of precisely that "Creed of Combat" the lack of
which du Picq deplored.
Of the value of du Picq's work to the professional soldier, I naturally
cannot speak, but even for the civilian, the student of military events, of
war and of the larger as well as the smaller circumstances of battle, its
usefulness can hardly be exaggerated. Reading it one understands
something, at least of the soul as well as the science of combat, the
great defeats and the great victories of history seem more intelligible in
simple terms of human beings. Beyond this lies the contemporaneous
value due to the fact that nowhere can one better understand Foch than
through the reading of du Picq.
By translating this volume of du Picq and thus making it available for
an American audience whose interest has been inevitably stirred by
recent events, the translators have done a public as well as a
professional service. Both officers enjoyed exceptional opportunities
and experiences on the Western front. Col. Greely from Cantigny to the
close of the battle of the Meuse-Argonne was not only frequently
associated with the French army, but as Chief of Staff of our own First

Division, gained a direct knowledge of the facts of battle, equal to that
of du Picq, himself.
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.
Thus, although he died in 1870, du Picq lives, through his book, as one
of