comes a time when solutions are made with ease. The process is not so automatic or unconscious as in the practice of something which has become a habit. There is in it, however, the ease and certainty of habit. War is the great game in which organized experience counts. If we had a true military history of this country, it would be the story of low military efficiency, due to the lack of organized experience among officers and men of our armies. In military training much time should be given to practicing the various plays a soldier must make in war, whereby a fund of experience is accumulated and organized, which will be available for quick and accurate decisions. The struggle in this sort of practice is the solution of problems. It requires trained masters to set these problems, guide, and criticise solutions. Under incompetent leadership experience may be organized to court disaster, in the absence of war to stamp a solution with the unmistakable mark of success or failure.

In addition to acquiring desirable habits and organizing military experience there are further struggles which are necessary to attain the mind of a soldier. The recruit has to learn to feel and think like a soldier. Behind his whole life must be created the proper emotional tone. It is marked by the absence of fear, a courageous spirit, cheerfulness, good comradeship, subordination, loyalty,

self-forgetfulness and a willingness to serve and be expended in the desire to conquer. It is often said that these qualities spring from the heart and not from the head. I think this is right if we substitute human nature for the word heart. Intelligence distinguishes between good and evil, paints ideals and discloses means of attaining them, but there is no driving force in intellect. A soldier is a man of action and the great push that leads to action has its main springs in the feelings. I shall later point out that it is in the play of instincts we find the imperative that controls conduct. Instincts are those innate habits which we have inherited from ages of ancestors running back to unknown sources before the Anglo-Saxons.

"Strong with the strength of the race to command, to obey, to endure."

A soldier should become an aggregation of tendencies to act in a firm, prompt, and definite way with a courageous spirit in all the principal emergencies which he may encounter. A proper training not only adjusts nerves and muscles in the formation of military habits, but it avails itself of and develops innate combinations and associations of brain cells to insure correct feelings and attain the driving force for correct actions. It has the further purpose of imparting to each soldier

knowledge of his place and part in the life of the organization to which he belongs, and in furnishing him experience with opportunities for practice and for organizing this experience until he develops a capacity to recognize the proper play for the solution of any situation in which he may find himself. These are the three aims of military education and create the conditions which insure success in war.

VI

HABITS

M

ILITARY authority has always recognized habit as the object of training because of the stable and reliable set it gives to behavior. The fundamental idea of training is the gradual inuring of the soldier to habits that become part of his very nature, by subjecting him and his actions, down to some of the minutest details of daily life, to an unremitting conformity to set orders and regulations.

The Duke of Wellington expressed this aim of military education in his reply to a proposition that habit was second nature. He said, "Habit is ten times nature."

The avowed object of the Prussian system of Frederick the Great was gradually to convert men into machines, and to make obedience, like an instinct, guide their action more powerfully than reason, intelligence, or any physical cause, and place their will power absolutely in the hands of a leader. In this system of instruction, uniformity played a prominent part. Uniformity in dress, in

cut of hair, and in every detail, from the way of lacing the boot to the pattern of a cane to be carried when off duty. Men were subordinated to the will of their leader by winding them about with countless fine threads of petty rules, customs, and restrictions. The soldiers of Frederick developed, what Lieutenant Murray defines as discipline. "That long-continued habit by which the very muscles of the soldier instinctively obey the word of command, so that, under whatever stress of circumstances, dangers, or death, he hears that word of command, even if his mind be too confused and astounded to attend, yet his muscles will obey and obey accurately."

The practices referred to have had a long, dignified, and conspicuous place in military history for their disciplinary value. The result of these practices is evidenced by smartness in dress and carriage, promptness and precision in executing commands, and by a deferential deportment toward seniors. Such appearances are the credentials of a leader's faith in his subordinates.

The methods of imparting these habits are more or less framed upon models that reached their highest development in the armies of Frederick the Great. The old Prussian system was said to be based on fear. Military writers generally agree that this system of training was sound in the days of standing mercenary armies, recruited from the