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, P tain will succeed, that the volume
\ufffd
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 F re Champenoise, the Yser and the
\ufffd
colossal conflict of 1918 to which historians have already applied the
name of the Battle of France, rightly to suggest its magnitude.
Read the hastily compiled lectures of Foch, the teacher of the cole
\ufffd
de Guerre, recall the fugitive but impressive words of Foch, the
soldier, uttered on the spur of the moment, filled with homely phrase,
and piquant figure and underlying all, one encounters the same
integral conception of war and of the relation of the moral to the
physical, which fills the all too scanty pages of du Picq.
"For me as a soldier," writes du Picq, "the smallest detail caught on
the spot and in the heat of action is more instructive than all the
Thiers and the Jominis in the world." Compare this with Foch
explaining to his friend Andr de Mariecourt, his own emotions at the
\ufffd
critical hour at F re Champenoise, when he had to invent something new
\ufffd
to beguile soldiers who had retreated for weeks and been beaten for
days. His tactical problem remained unchanged, but he must give his
soldiers, tired with being beaten to the "old tune" a new air, which
would appeal to them as new, something to which they had not been
beaten, and the same philosophy appears.
Du Picq's contemporaries neglected his warning, they saw only the
outward circumstances of the Napoleonic and Frederican successes. In
vain du Picq warned them that the victories of Frederick were not the
logical outgrowth of the minutiae of the Potsdam parades. But du Picq
dead, the Third Empire fallen, France prostrated but not annihilated
by the defeats of 1870, a new generation emerged, of which Foch was
but the last and most shining example. And this generation went back,
powerfully aided by the words of du Picq, to that older tradition, to
the immutable principles of war.
With surprising exactness du Picq, speaking in the abstract, foretold
an engagement in which the mistakes of the enemy would be
counterbalanced by their energy in the face of French passivity, lack
of any control conception. Forty years later in the cole de Guerre,
\ufffd
Foch explained the reasons why the strategy of Moltke, mistaken in all
respects, failed to meet the ruin it deserved, only because at
Gravelotte Bazaine could not make up his mind, solely because of the
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a great book by a great thinker.i read it fisrt time in 1978
great writer