“Who with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn.”

The quality that made them both so valuable was that they knew the best that was known and thought in regard to the art of war.  This is the quality which a nation must secure in those whom it entrusts with the design and the conduct of the operations of its fleets and its armies.

There is a method for securing this, not by any means a new one, and not originally, as is commonly supposed, a German invention.  It consists in providing the army and the navy with a General Staff or Department for the study, design, and direction of operations.  In such a department Bourcet, Napoleon’s master, spent the best years of his life.  In such a department Moltke was trained; over such a department he presided.  Its characteristic is that it has one function, that of the study, design, and direction of the movements in fighting of a fleet or an army, and that it has nothing whatever to do with the maintenance of an army, or with its recruiting, discipline, or peace administration.  Its functions in peace are intellectual and educational, and in war it becomes the channel of executive power.  Bourcet described the head of such a department as “the soul of an army.”  The British navy is without such a department.  The army has borrowed the name, but has not maintained the speciality of function which is essential.  In armies other than the British, the Chief of the General Staff is occupied solely with tactics and strategy, with the work of intellectual research by which Nelson and Napoleon prepared their great achievements.  His business is to be designing campaigns, to make up his mind at what point or points, in case of war, he will assemble his fleets or his armies for the first move, and what the nature of that move shall be.  The second move it is impossible for him to pre-arrange because it depends upon the result of the first.  He will determine the second move when the time comes.  In order that his work should be as well done as possible, care is taken that the Chief of the Staff shall have nothing else to do.  Not he but another officer superintends the raising, organising, and disciplining of the forces.  Thus he becomes the embodiment of a theory or system of operations, and with that theory or system he inspires as far as possible all the admirals or generals and other officers who will have to carry out his designs.

In the British system the Chief of the General Staff is the principal military member of the Board which administers the army.  Accordingly, only a fraction of his time can be given to thinking out the problems of strategy and tactics.  At the Admiralty the principal naval member of the Board is made responsible not only for the distribution and movements of ships—­a definition which includes the whole domain of strategy and tactics—­but also for the fighting and sea-going efficiency of the fleet, its organisation