LAND & WATER 
December 6, 191 7 
,nmtan- situation unless he is possessed of lour kinds of 
knowledge reUating to it 
(*) 
Ncpw 
The mtur,- of the ground. .«^v's 
The numerical disposttwn of his own and the enemy s 
Thecond'itims of supply for his own and the enemy s 
forces- , , 
TJie moral of his own and the enemy s forces. 
ground " does not only mean a knowledge ol tne 
mai>^W veTa knowledge of the map even in its largest 
lin^is not a thing which most people ca;sily .arqu.re--it 
Sometimes rapidly changing thmg, peculiarly difficult to esti 
mate in the enemy's case ; difficult enough to estimate m hii 
own, needing daily obsen^ation and care, daily reinforcement, 
correction and change. It is for the soldier a large comp ex 
field of many factors, upon the whole stable, but only stable 
because every point is carefully watched and supported. 
For the critic of the soldier "it is something quite different. 
He does not leave out moral, but he simplifies it in a childish 
fashion, a-nd, true to the traditions of sensation and advertise- 
ment, he exaggerates it wildly. He is the recipient of all 
the silliest rumours, of all the wildest descriptions whether 
of panic upon one's own side, or of despair upon the enemy's. 
lines !.-» ""•• " o. ••:- ^i„*.^ "f tU„ Jr.il in vnrioUS 01 panic upon one s own siuc, ui ui ut,=j^ 
means aJso an appreciation «^ ^he state of the so 'n | ariou ^^ .k ^^^^ p.^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^.^^ ^^^ exaggerated intrigue 
of what will happen to 
watercoui^es after a thaw 'or except iccna> rain; and in 
ueneral a vhole volume of knowledge which men concentrated 
up .n their profession can, when they ai.iE exceptional men 
?quire witb a certain degree of rapidity, T^ut which most me 
do not attempt to acquire ; andVliich most men, if they tned 
to acquire it. would fail to acquire. 
Of all men in all professions there are perhaps two kinds 
least fitted to compete in such knowledge - the first is the man 
who has lived by limelight and intrigue, and the second is 
the man who has lived by making sensajtions. Such careers, 
beyond all others, dissipate the power for concentrated, 
sol'id and, above all, rapid brain work; and those who arc 
corrupted by such careers are the least capable of criticising 
soldier-^. If we ask ourselves why, being the least htted to 
interfere with military' things, they aro none the less the hrst 
to do so, the answer is that such iriterference lends itselt 
particularly to public show and to s'^nsation and to intrigue 
^f>ainst individuals. Of intellectual basis it has none. 
against individuals. 
Erratic Qriticism 
If it is difficult to master ground, it is in a sense, even more 
difficult to master numbers and disposition. The politician- 
may be told in the way of busimss, the. journalist may be told 
by an indiscretion, the numbers and the order of forces upon 
ei'lher side in any p.^rt of the field. That either will remembci' 
these under the stiainlof public advertiaement.and forced excite- 
ment is doubtful, but at any rate, that kind of knowledge is 
at least available. When it comes to the meaning of such num- 
bers and of .such dispositions neither of these two kinds of 
critics has any standing whatsoever. M hy, it is the test of 
excellence in "a commander that he should be able to read 
even partially the riddle presentedTay concentration and dis- 
persion of forces. If he has an excellent Chief of Staff, and 
therefore an excellent Bureau piecing together intelligence 
and repr>rting accurately what there is in front of him and how 
it changes— even so he has to interpret the will that is behind 
such grouping, what part of it may be intended to deceive, 
what part may be used, and why. The greatest masters of 
war have, if you will read their mjemoirs, particularly remem- 
bered what they did not grasp in the enemy's plan. That is 
their interest in the whole affair. They know that there vv ill 
always be a very large margin erf error ; their interest is to 
see how far it can be reduced. But your unmilitary critic 
works on quite another principle. He always knows— a/ter 
the eneni— what the enemy was intending, and why such and 
such a concentration was made in one place, and such and 
such a witfidrawal of forces from another ; how this disposi- 
tion would be used, and with what effect. He always knows, 
I say, after the event, what these things mean, but he will 
also, unfortunately, presume to knOw beforehand what should 
be done, although he eliminates in this forecast any know- 
ledge of the enemy's dispositions or of the counter-disposi- 
tions on our own side. 
In the matter of supply the contrast Is more striking still. 
SuppK' is the great material preoccupation of all commanders. 
It is the one great material factor which governs everything. 
A man can rest uptm his oars and forget movement for many 
days at a time ; he can forget for some hours disposition and 
ground ; but supply occupies his thought in e\'ery waking 
moment of the day ; it conditions everything. That is what 
supply is to the soldier. The other person, who wants to 
tell the soldier what to do, has a very simple way 
of treating supply —he leaves it out altogether. He will 
propose the reinforcement of the Russian front with two 
million Americans, or the moving in a day or two of a score 
of di\ isions over 700 or 800 miles of railway. He vaguely 
thinks of the rolling stock as infinite ; he vaguely attaches the 
s;nne miraculous quality to the condition of rails, the number 
<if sidings, or of tracks, the stores of coal and of petrol, spare 
p 11 ts, repair shops, and the hundred other things of which he 
has not so much as heard. 
Lastly, in the fourth element, that of moral, you have yet 
another kind of disaster. The soldier judges it with difficulty 
and as a highly complex, sometimes slightly changing, 
relati^'ely dangerous in the other three parts of knowledge, 
he is here actively and positively dangerous. He spreiids 
panic or false report about the enemy in a fashion winch 
soldiers punish sometimes with death, but which the civilian 
busybody indulges in as though it were a normal excitement. 
The Second Principle 
The second leading principle is this ! That military opera- 
tions require for their success competen' unity of command. 
The word "competent" in this definition is essential. 
The words " unity of command" does not necessarily sig- 
nify a mechanical unity; it signifies a unity of intention 
and plan. 
When the outsider interferes with military alfairs under 
the plea of producing unity of command he breaks this canon 
in two ways. Firs' of all the unity which he proposes being 
derived from himself, is not competent. He is not competent 
to judge a military situation or to decide upon it. 
, Secondly, by his very action he disturbs, modifies, and may 
disintegrate that very unity of command of which he speaks. 
Unity of command does not necessarily mean the directing 
of all military operations, in no matter what field (so long as 
they are contemporary), by one brain. That is, indeed, an 
ideal state of things which, when it can be accomplished, 
leads to prodigious results, first of success, and soon after- 
wards, in most cases, of disaster. For this ideal with its fruit 
of immediate success, often followed by corresponding disas- 
ter (because authority has to be too distanth- delegated, 
and the field becomes too great for one man— Napoleon is 
the leading example) is not the essehtial test of unity of 
command. That test is to be discovered in co-ordination of 
operation, and particularly is this true of an alliance. 
It is e\'en true of separate operations, conducted by one 
power : for instance, the separate operations conducted 
by the generals of the French Republic in 1796, or the separate 
successful operations conducted by the Roman State at the 
end of the Second Punic War. But in the case of a true 
alliance, that is, of an alliance between Powers more or less 
equal, an essential unity of command is not obtained as a 
rule by subordination to one head. It is attained more easily, 
and certainly as history goes more successfully, by agreed 
balance between two or three men each responsible for his 
national army. An alliance is, of its nature, weaker in the 
matter of unity than a single Power or than a single Power 
controlling subject vassals. But granted that inevitable 
condition, the essential quality of unity of command is dis- 
covered in its best by co-ordination. 
When the operations of an army are successful, no one doubts 
this, and if we consider the classic instances of a true alliance 
succeeding in the field, we shall find that it is usually conducted 
after this fashion. You have in our own military history alone 
the examples of Eugene and Marlborough, and the still more 
striking instance of Wellington and Blucher. There was plenty 
of the friction ine\itablc from double command, but although 
the operations of the Waterloo campaign were all within one 
narrow field, dual command was maintained. Had the 
campaign failed, we should ha\'e heard for a hundred years 
that the cause of its failure was this dualcomman 1- although 
that dual command was inevitable; As a fact, it succeeded, 
and no one temembers the disability under w'hich it sufi'ered. 
It was not W eliington who ordered the retreat after Ligny. 
Wellington had doubted the value of the Ligny position ; 
Wellington grumbled badly about the delay of his ally on the 
critical afternoon of the i8th. The Prussians, I fancy, 
might equally have complained that they were the first to meet 
and to understand the moment of the invasion. But the 
tiling to remember is that the alliance succeeded. That 
alliance would have failed had it been possible for a third 
civilian party to intervene, discuss, modify, or even disturb 
the action of the two generals. 
The Third Principle 
There is a third principle attaching to all military operations 
equally repugnant to a certain type of p(ftitician and journalist, 
1 
