THE STUDY OP MILITARY HISTORY. 
405 
arms, or the degrees of slope on which they can move. 
A subaltern will regard it as a waste of time to penetrate as far as a 
captain is required to, and the latter will be careful not to cross the 
limit assigned to a man of his rank. Yet it is while we are still young 
that our ideas are most easily moulded, and it is our early training 
which sticks to us through life. A man’s responsibilities, too, become 
greater as he becomes older, the command of a battery, battalion or 
regiment implies a considerable amount of office work, and when he 
attains to it he has less time to read and is often too weary of books to 
do so. 
Neither do the chances on active service come only to the seniors. 
Bonaparte at Rivoli and Wellington at Assaye were younger than 
are many of our subalterns, and the exigencies of a campaign may 
easily throw a command upon a youth which in peace time he would 
not inherit till he was grey headed. A subaltern may easily have to 
take the place of major, or even colonel, at a moment’s notice, for, be 
it remembered, that at Yionville the Fusilier battalion of the 40th 
regiment lost all its officers between 10 and 11 a.m.; facts, formulas and 
statistics badly put are soon forgotten when the emergency for which 
they were learnt is past and done with, and studied in that way the dry 
rules which are culled from military history soon come to be regarded 
by the student rather as useful for examination purposes than for 
practical application in the field. 
There is another plan, and we can hardly afford to despise it, and 
that is, if possible, first to imbue a boy with the spirit and love for the 
game, to make him understand its broad features, and then, when you 
have roused his attention, lead him on to examine into the causes that 
produced victory or defeat. If you wished a boy to become a good 
whist player you would not begin by making him read extracts from 
Cavendish. You would let him play <e Bumble Puppy ” first of all, and 
then gradually entice him to mould his play on scientific principles, 
little by little carrying him further as his interest grew. 
It is an abuse of a most entrancing part of literature to cut out all 
the romance and human nature and leave only the dry facts to be learnt 
by heart. 
A pudding with all the plums pulled out may be equally nutritious, 
and, even theoretically, more wholesome than one rich with such 
attractions, but a child for all that, will not enjoy it, or even eat it, and 
even if it be compelled to swallow it, will not derive the same benefit as 
if it devoured it with zest and pleasure. A boy, (and a soldier, or even 
an officer, is often still a boy, even when he has been a good many 
years in the service,) when he first reads campaigns will pick out all 
the fighting, just as a child will seize the plums in the pudding, and if 
it arouses his interest and enthusiasm it is quite right that he should 
do so. But very soon, if he has intelligence, he can be led to inquire 
how and why the encounters which delight him were brought about, 
the glowing tale will tempt him also by degrees to investigate closely 
the reason why one hero was defeated, or why another won, and he will 
soon begin to probe into the mechanism which sets military machinery 
