Marshal Saxe asserted in his
"Reveries" that down to his time there had been no formulation of
principles, and that if any had been recognized as such in the minds
of commanders of armies, they had not made it known. [Footnote:
Jomini, in the work already cited, quotes Marshal Saxe thus: "Que
toutes les sciences avaient des principes, mais que la guerre seule
n'en avait point encore; si ces principes ont existe dans la tete de
quelques generaux, nulle part ils n'ont ete indiques ou developpes."
The same idea has been put quite as trenchantly by one of the most
recent writers of the English Army, Colonel J. F. Maurice, R. A.
Professor in the Farnborough Staff College. In the able article on
"War" in the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he says,
"it must be emphatically asserted that there does not exist, and
never except by pedants of whom the most careful students of war are
more impatient than other soldiers, has there ever been supposed to
exist, an 'art of war' which was something other than the methodic
study of military history."]
It was precisely in this department of military history "raisonnee"
that frontier garrison life shut the young army officer out from the
opportunities of profiting by his leisure.
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