plans of his grand operations. Many lessons taught in his permanent camps of instruction had to be unlearned in the field; many of the strategic and tactical movements of his carlier campaigns were condemned as faulty, and either vastly improved or entirely thrown aside for others, in the course of his various wars; every new field of operations showed changes, and was unlike its predecessors. Almost his first step in his first Italian campaign was to put a limit to the loose system of skirmishing, and to prescribe its extent, and the time and place for its proper use. By making a body of voltigeurs from the smallest and most active of his men, he was able to preserve his powerful grenadiers for the decisive moment, when weight tells. Then followed the new distribution of his line of battle, so as to have at certain points a proportionate reserve of all arms: his divisions of ten battalions went into action with four battalions deployed in the first line, four in column in the second line, and two battalions of skirmishers who were used to bring on an engagement, and then were withdrawn and formed in column of reserve behind the second line. Each battalion had nine companies; those of the grenadiers were consolidated in one division, intrusted to OUDINOT, and specially designated as a grand reserve, while the others sent out each one company as skirmishers, and so formed eight-company battalions for attack. By a careful distribution of cavalry and artillery to each corps, it was found that a long defensive line could be held against a largely superior attacking force, while at any given point a column of attack could be formed with comparative leisure. These changes brought with them almost necessarily a reform in all the systems of deployment, and the object sought for, and finally obtained, was to adopt that order of tactics which should be the simplest, the surest, and the speediest, exacting the perfectness of a machine with the living power of the individual.

To complete and perfect his army, to enable him to throw aside the old theory of a long line of battle, of magazines and depots, of a single line of operations, of a common base of supplies, of a uniform order of march, and a regular concentration of his whole force at the end of each day, and to adopt in its stead a new system of living off the enemy, of disguising his front by a thin line of skirmishers, of giving to each corps, and, if need be, to cach division, its own sphere of independent action and movement within any part of the great circle, and yet to be able to infuse his own spirit into every nerve and muscle of the new being that he had thus created, and to be always and everywhere present, acting, seeing, and doing, one thing was needed; and that Napoleon supplied by his staff organization. Through this he saw, heard, spoke, wrote, thought, and, overcoming the limits of individual power, became omniscient and omnipresent. One man may perhaps command at furthest a thousand men. Go

beyond this limit, and there must be found some artificial means to control even the most thorough organization.

Now-a-days a general must know where to find the enemy, how the ground lies before him and between them, what route to choose for his march, what distances can be made, where supplies are to be got, the strength of his army, its losses either on the march or in battle, its daily requirements, and a thousand things which no one man can ever learn. A well-organized staff is the means of knowing every thing and of doing every thing; it is the same element in an army that the electric wire is to the telegraph; it transmits the spirit, the commands, the ideas, the plans, and it is equally the channel for every kind of information, for every requirement, for every want, for every anticipation, that enables the general to order and the army to obey.

Napoleon so organized his staff as to establish the most perfect relations between himself and his army, and yet without at all putting any limit or restriction on the proper independence of each of its separate elements. The staff had two branches, one administrative, the other military; the one in charge of an adjutant-general (chef de l'état major-général), the other of a quartermaster-general (maréchal-général des logis). To the former belonged the duty of collecting all reports as to the condition and strength of the army, its arms, its supplies, its commissariat, its medical and surgical wants, its artillery, its topography, and all their subordinate relations. To the latter belonged the task of collecting information of every kind as to the enemy, his position, his strength, and plans; and as to the army itself and all its dependencies. A common supervision over both was intrusted to the chief of staff, the alter ego of the general himself; and whatever was left undone by either of these subordinate wings belonged peculiarly to his functions. Once fairly started, the staff was so distributed throughout the army that its representative had a place assigned him in every branch of the service; and in the performance of the duties of the staff there was a training which exceeded for useful and successful results all the elaborate schools that have since been specially organized for the "Etat-Major."*

The enemies of France were slow indeed to learn the secret of Napoleon's successes, and still slower, having once learned them, to adopt them. For years France remained the only European nation that was really one great organized army. At last,

* Indeed, Jomini is so earnest in his praises of this discovery of Napoleon's that he deduced the name Logistics from the French title for our quartermastergeneral,-major-général des logis. Its proper derivation is from the Greek word 20yarns, logistes, skilled in reasoning or reckoning; for it is peculiarly the function of staff officers to supply just that sort of skill to the general who is to act, and the whole sphere of that branch called logistics is exactly coequal with the duties that were first prescribed by Napoleon for the staff.

however, the Germans introduced the administrative and the organic reforms and changes which the French Revolution had produced in the art of war. As each nation, Spain, Russia, Germany, in turn grew into a living military power, rising in its whole. strength and majesty, the tide of success was turned in their favor, and the defeats of the French under Napoleon became as unparalleled as had been their victories. His old truths proved false, his old might became weakness, his old power was gone; his marshals failed him on the field, abandoned him in council, and betrayed him to the enemy. In restraining the independence of his people, he had destroyed their capacity as well for good as for evil; in endeavoring to make a perfect military organization of the whole nation, he overshot the mark: the army became isolated, and its tie of flesh and blood with the people was forever severed. Rivalry for place, for reward, for promotion, swallowed up the old passion for glory and the old devotion to the country's cause. Love of wealth and rank, and inclination to enjoy them, had extinguished patriotism and ambition. All this change in France was going on at the same time that the rest of Europe was awakening to a new national life and to a new military spirit. The gradual progress in Prussia, for instance, of a reorganization by which every citizen became a soldier, was as surely an entering wedge for future success, as the way in which the French soldiers ceased to be citizens was the augury of future defeat. The very training that France had taught its unwilling allies became an instrument in their impending wars for independence.

Two men particularly are dear to Germany for their efforts to secure the means of a national war against Napoleon. SCHARNHORST Spent the best years of his life in preparing his countrymen for the final struggle. YORK seized the happy moment, almost as by an inspiration, of Napoleon's extremest weakness, and hurried on the storm that finally wrecked beyond recovery the greatness and power of the French Empire. With every fresh defeat Napoleon had taught his enemies how best to meet and overcome his attacks, and a very little was needed to change the eagle of victory from his standard to theirs. That little, SCHARNHORST first gave his country. As early as 1801, he had taught the new theory of war to a few hearers, pupils of a military school; but, until the campaigns of 1806 and 1807 had illustrated and proved his theory, it was hardly understood. He was summoned to help to reorganize the army; and he began by abolishing all disgraceful punishments, and every badge that made military service mean and discreditable in the eyes of the civilian. Then came the new idea of a national army, made up of the whole population: it was an easy step to a general adaptation of the principle that every citizen is bound to do military duty. When, in 1808, Napoleon decreed that the standing army of Prussia should not exceed forty-two thousand men, SCHARNHORST reor

ganized into brigades, corresponding to French divisions, each with seven battalions, one or two cavalry regiments, and one or two batteries; the other cavalry and artillery forces were placed in reserve brigades of their own. By rapidly discharging trained soldiers, and careful selection of recruits, the number of instructed men throughout the country was largely increased; by adopting the simplest technical rules and the clearest and best manual for drill and manoeuvres, any sudden emergency could soon be met by a uniform and well-trained force. At the first summons in 1813, a "Landwehr" of one hundred and forty thousand was put in the field, and, besides the "Landsturm," or reserve at home, there was a whole army of "Freicorps," real volunteers, set on foot, supplying a kind of disciplined Spanish guerrilla and Russian Cossack, fit for any duty.

So rapidly did the allied armies learn their lesson, that in the final struggle both sides foresaw that the success lay with the greater numbers; and, brilliant as were his military moves, Napoleon himself knew that his five hundred thousand could not prolong the contest against the six hundred thousand brought into France. Exhausted by their enormous efforts, the long peace that followed was not less useful to the armies themselves than to their respective states. While the people once more pursued their customary avocations, soldiers and officers alike shared in the improved and improving popular education. The well-recognized principle of national armies as a permanent part of the government itself made the strength of each army proportionable to that of the population. Improvements in drill, in arms, in munitions of war, followed each other in a rapid contest for superiority and a peaceful rivalry. Only two of the great military Powers maintained each a standing war as a sort of private luxury of its own, a school of instruction for its officers, a theatre for the ambition and zeal of its soldiers, and a grand crucible in which to test the abundant and extravagant theories advanced in every branch of military science. Of the numerous reforms thus proposed, only a few improvements in clothing, small arms, artillery, and ammunition have stood the test of these petty wars, or of the few great operations of the last cycle of European history. These operations were not, in fact, grand wars; for in the petty German revolutions of 1848 and 1849, as well as in the Crimean War and in the Italian war of 1859, certain definite objects were to be attained, certain fixed points made the wager, and, these once gained, the losing side threw up the game, made no further effort to prolong the contest, and little or nothing was done to test the ultimate power or the real strength of either side. The last thirty years have, in fact, produced little or no change in war as a science, although the subordinate technical arts into which it is divided have grown

into an importance that requires for each a special culture, too often sacrificing great principles to mere temporary rules.

The great wars which began with the French Revolution and ended with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo form a grand drama, in which the most striking study is the development of a new Art of War. In none of the wars that have taken place since that time, down to the outbreak of our own gigantic Rebellion, is there any historical and military unity. The wars of the French Revolution divided all Europe into two great armies, which fought and had to fight for life or death. At the beginning the discovery and instant adaptation of a new theory gave France a preponderating power that destroyed alike the old systems and their supporters; gradually, however, as France taught the rest of Europe how to fight, it made its enemies its equals and then its conquerors. In the wars of our own generation we see only separate individual groups, each by itself, standing alone, with no real or lasting influence on the great truths of war, and in turn little influenced by them,-success always crowning the side which, by good fortune or by pure accident, used advantageously some cardinal rule taught by the great lessons and the great masters of the Napoleonic wars. The very novelties that had been carefully tested in the leisure of absolute peace, seem to have been adopted only to imperil the well-established rules of real war; even the introduction of the improvements that have become necessary in civil life is attended with dangerous results. The use of the system of railroads that are part and parcel of the trade, nay, of the very existence, of a commercial nation, has proved that wars may or must stop at wars of position, and this tendency is rapidly aggravated to a prodigious evil by the improved arms, equipments, and means of supply that are common to all armies. One result is that the larger army always loses in a vastly larger proportion, and the advantage of action that its small, illy provided, and desperate opponent has, may postpone the inevitable victory to a distant day, and make it cost fearfully in life and treasure. Another result is the extravagant luxury which necessarily follows an army of position, and often saps its strength and demoralizes its troops more fatally than the greatest hardships or the fiercest enemy.

The operations of our own war are governed by peculiar elements, partly due to the political-principally, however, to the physical-features of the country; but, giving to all of these their due consideration, it is still plain that our system of war bears too much resemblance to the fashions of a century ago, and too little to the rapid, concentrated, effective movements that characterized Napoleon's campaigns. It would have been better for us if our military lessons had been limited to the history of our own century, to the exclusion of that of the conventional names of an earlier day. With the cannonading at