LAND AND WATER 
December 26, 1914. 
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which to use it, you are worse off than if you had 
no reserve at all. It is evident that to work with 
a large reserve means to work with a correspond- 
ingly weaker general force at the front, and if you 
waste your reserve by throwing it in either too 
early or too late you will have run that heavy risk 
of working with insufficient numbers, or barely 
sufficient numbers, and you will have run it in vain. 
But if you do judge your moment rightly then the 
possession of a reserve is decisive. You have 
risked a great deal. You have worked wdth too 
thin a line perhaps in your determination to keep 
back your last reserve for the decisive moment. 
You have heard a great deal of grumbling from the 
people suffering the strain at the front ; you have 
had to suffer the acute anxiety of waiting for 
the decisive moment, and wondering, perhaps, 
whether it will ever come. The whole method 
means the severest control of oneself and of one's 
supporters, as well as the most exact judgment. 
But if you do use your judgment exactly and re- 
sist all temptation to use yeur reserve too early, 
then the method is the most decisive possible in 
war. Napoleon's later campaigns give numerous 
examples of both success and failure in this 
method. At Ligny he used his reserve just in 
time; at Borodino, or the Moscowa, he waited too 
long and never used his reserve at all : with the 
result that the action was not really decided. At 
Waterloo he perhaps used it too late, though that 
in' its turn was due to the blunder Ney made in 
launching his cavalry too early. The position in 
France and Belgium at this moment is, on a very 
large strategical scale, what these and other actions 
