The development of this work leads us to make such an analysis, and from a study of combat we may learn to know man.
Let us go even back of ancient battle, to primeval struggle. In progressing from the savage to our times we shall get a better grasp of life.
And shall we then know as much as the masters? No more than one is a painter by having seen the methods of painting. But we shall better understand these able men and the great examples they have left behind them.
We shall learn from them to distrust mathematics and material dynamics as applied to battle principles. We shall learn to beware of the illusions drawn from the range and the maneuver field.
There, experience is with the calm, settled, unfatigued, attentive, obedient soldier, with an intelligent and tractable man-instrument in short, and not with the nervous, easily swayed, moved, troubled, distrait, excited, restless being, not even under self-control, who is the fighting man from general to private. There are strong men, exceptions, but they are rare.
These illusions, nevertheless, stubborn and persistent, always repair the very next day the most damaging injuries inflicted on them by experience. Their least dangerous effect is to lead to prescribing the impractical, as if ordering the impractical were not really an attack on discipline, and did not result in disconcerting officers and men by the unexpected and by surprise at the contrast between battle and the theories of peacetime training.
Battle, of course, always furnishes surprises. But it furnishes less in proportion as good sense and the recognition of truth have had their effect on the training of the fighting man, and are disseminated in the ranks. Let us then study man in battle, for it is he who really fights.