Every candidate for admission to the Academy is required to say whether he proposes to take up the subjects grouped as mathematical sciences, or a language, and if a language whether French or Russian.
[[7]] The conventions are the agreements with Prussia by which the armies of Saxony, Bavaria, and Würtemberg are regulated.
[[8]] The practice tour (Uebungsreise) is a sham fight, or rather a sham campaign, carried out in the district chosen for the purpose by officers without men. The troops are imaginary, but the officers taking part in the exercise are assigned to the several posts of command, and upon the basis of the imaginary situation, communicated by the umpire, work out all the necessary orders and dispositions.
CHAPTER III
THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING
The condition of success in the higher education is that the teacher should be himself a student. He should have in his subject that vital interest which comes of the endeavour to extend his mastery and to widen in his own particular branch the existing bounds of knowledge and achievement. The true teacher does not study his subject in order to be able to teach, but teaches because he is possessed by his subject. The benefits of teaching in the higher stages are therefore never one-sided. The pupil returns in a different form the help which he receives. For while the elucidation of principles acquires a peculiar freshness and force in the hands of an active pioneer of knowledge, the necessities of exposition compel the investigator to keep his researches in contact with the system or body of doctrine which he expounds. This fundamental relation between teaching and research is realized in the connection between the War Academy and the great general staff.
It has already been shown how the great general staff is the organ by which during peace its chief collects and sifts the information upon which he bases his plan for the opening of a campaign, and how, when the operations have begun, the general staff, through its several ramifications, keeps him supplied with the data concerning his own army and that of the enemy which he requires from time to time in order to shape his further decisions.
All this is but preliminary or preparatory work. The decisive act is that by which the chief of the staff, from the information he has thus acquired, constructs a problem and designs its solution—puts to himself the question, What is now to be done? and answers it. Thus in the last analysis the soul of the organism resides in the chief of the staff, and is manifested in the exercise of his peculiar faculties. It therefore becomes necessary to investigate the nature and origin of the qualities in virtue of which he is fitted for his post.
The Order of Teaching of the War Academy explains the method by which, in an elementary stage, the intellectual faculties requisite for command are developed and trained. The mental outfit of the ideal general is there analyzed into its constituent parts, which are classified according to their importance. The highest place is assigned to military history as "the most effective means of teaching war during peace."[[1]] Accordingly the study of military history, to which so large a space is assigned in the course of the War Academy, is pursued on a higher plane by the great general staff, which has a special department for its cultivation. In this historical work, and in the method on which it is conducted, lies the secret of Prussian generalship.
The leading ideas of the school must be sought in the writings of Clausewitz,[[2]] the great exponent of the lessons learned in Prussia from the wars against Napoleon. Clausewitz distinguishes the mere narration of events, which gives at most the superficial relations of cause and effect, from their critical examination. In the critical method applied to military history he defines[[3]] three stages or operations. There is first the historical process proper, which has for its object the ascertainment of the facts so far as this is possible with the existing materials. Upon the basis thus furnished the military student will proceed to seek to understand the events in their relations as cause and effect, and then when their real historical connection[[4]] has thus been determined will undertake to form a judgment as to the fitness of the means employed for the ends which it was sought to attain.