399 
f Ua AUGgllBOT S 
THE STUDY ok'lfTEIf^Y HISTORY, 
V __^ ^ 27 
A MEANS OF TRAINING FOR WAR. 
MAJOR E. S. MAT, R.H.A. 
- V* 
(ALecture delivered to the Some District Tactical Society, 9th December, 1896.)* 
n ■ i 
Major-General Lord Methuen, C.B., C.M.G., in the Chair. 
My Lord and Gentlemen —Some may think it strange that now, at 
the close of the nineteenth century, I should think it worth while to 
enlarge on so well worn a topic as the above. 
We live in an age of countless books, of free libraries, public reading- 
rooms and a multitudinous press. If we are to judge by the aspect of 
the bookstalls at our railway stations or the difficulty of getting the 
latest novel from a lending library, everybody is devoted to books and 
literature of every sort. And yet the truth is that the generality of our 
officers, whether of the regular or auxiliary forces, and an even greater 
majority (as is only to be expected), of the men they lead, give but little 
time to anything beyond what the pressure of successive examinations 
forces upon them. 
I was talking the other day to a publisher and asking him as to the 
sale of military books, and he finished the discussion by saying, the 
fact is the men in your profession don’t read anything they are not 
ordered to \ ” Then, again, I noticed in a little book that may have 
surprised some of my hearers as much as it did me when I read it a 
few months ago, published in America and called f<r The Soldier in 
Battle,” that across the Atlantic there exists in some minds (for the 
author presumably speaks for more than himself) a great prejudice 
against what we call the scientific education of generals, and that in 
that author's view no man who had graduated at West Point was worth 
a button in the field. 
This is a specimen of what he has to say:—Again I carried out 
with me from the ranks, not only the feeling but the knowledge 
* Readers will note that, though, only published now, this was the first of the lectures on this 
subject delivered by various lecturers in the course of the current year.—A. J. A. 
8. vox,, xxiv. 
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