This sensitiveness as to the merits of their particular profession, and impatience of even indirect criticism, are unnecessary.  There is nothing in the history of war to show that an untrained force is better than a trained force.  On the contrary, all historical evidence is on the other side.  In quite as many instances as are presented by the opposite, the forces which put an unexpected end to the military supremacy long possessed by their antagonists were themselves, in the strictest sense of the word, ‘regulars.’  The Thebans whom Epaminondas led to victory over the Spartans at Leuctra no more resembled a hasty levy of armed peasants or men imperfectly trained as soldiers than did Napoleon’s army which overthrew the Prussians at Jena, or the Germans who defeated the French at Gravelotte and Sedan.  Nothing could have been less like an ‘irregular’ force than the fleet with which La Galissonniere beat Byng off Minorca, or the French fleets which, in the war of American Independence, so often disappointed the hopes of the British.  The records of war on land and by sea—­especially the extracts from them included in the enumeration already given—­lend no support to the silly suggestion that efficient defence can be provided for a country by ’an untrained man with a rifle behind a hedge.’  The truth is that it was not the absence of organisation or training on one side which enabled it to defeat the other.  If the beaten side had been elaborately organised and carefully trained, there must have been something bad in its organisation or its methods.

Now this ‘something bad,’ this defect—­wherever it has disclosed itself—­has been enough to neutralise the most splendid courage and the most unselfish devotion.  It has been seen that armies and navies the valour of which has never been questioned have been defeated by antagonists sometimes as highly organised as they were, and sometimes much less so.  This ought to put us on the track of the cause which has produced an effect so little anticipated.  A ‘regular’ permanently embodied or maintained service of fighting men is always likely to develop a spirit of intense professional self-satisfaction.  The more highly organised it is, and the more sharply its official frontiers are defined, the more intense is this spirit likely to become.  A ‘close’ service of the kind grows restive at outside criticism, and yields more and more to the conviction that no advance in efficiency is possible unless it be the result of suggestions emanating from its own ranks.  Its view of things becomes narrower and narrower, whereas efficiency in war demands the very widest view.  Ignorant critics call the spirit thus engendered ‘professional conservatism’; the fact being that change is not objected to—­is even welcomed, however frequent it may be, provided only that it is suggested from inside.  An immediate result is ’unreality and formalism of peace training’—­to quote a recent thoughtful military critic.