Battle Studies; Ancient and Modern Battle

MY DEAR GENERAL: Colonel Ardant du Picq was the exponent of moral force , the most powerful element in the strength of armies. He has shown it to be the preponderating influence in the outcome of battles. Your son has accomplished a very valuable work in translating his writings. One finds his conclusions amply verified in the experience of the American Army during the last war, notably in the campaign of 1918. Accept, my dear General, my best regards. F. FOCH.

BY FRANK H. SIMONDS Author of History of the World War, 'They Shall Not Pass'—Verdun, Etc.
In presenting to the American reading public a translation of a volume written by an obscure French colonel, belonging to a defeated army, who fell on the eve of a battle which not alone gave France over to the enemy but disclosed a leadership so inapt as to awaken the suspicion of treason, one is faced by the inevitable interrogation— Why?
Yet the answer is simple. The value of the book of Ardant du Picq lies precisely in the fact that it contains not alone the unmistakable forecast of the defeat, itself, but a luminous statement of those fundamental principles, the neglect of which led to Gravelotte and Sedan.
Napoleon has said that in war the moral element is to all others as three is to one. Moreover, as du Picq impressively demonstrates, while all other circumstances change with time, the human element remains the same, capable of just so much endurance, sacrifice, effort, and no more. Thus, from Caesar to Foch, the essential factor in war endures unmodified.
And it is not the value of du Picq's book, as an explanation of the disasters of 1870, but of the triumphs of 1914-18, which gives it present and permanent interest. It is not as the forecast of why Bazaine, a type of all French commanders of the Franco-Prussian War, will fail, but why Foch, Joffre, Pétain will succeed, that the volume invites reading to-day.
Beyond all else, the arresting circumstances in the fragmentary pages, perfect in themselves but incomplete in the conception of their author, is the intellectual and the moral kinship they reveal between the soldier who fell just before the crowning humiliation of Gravelotte and the victor of Fère Champenoise, the Yser and the colossal conflict of 1918 to which historians have already applied the name of the Battle of France, rightly to suggest its magnitude.