As the formalism becomes more pronounced, so the unreality increases.  The proposer or introducer of a system of organisation of training or of exercises is often, perhaps usually, capable of distinguishing between the true and the false, the real and the unreal.  His successors, the men who continue the execution of his plans, can hardly bring to their work the open mind possessed by the originator; they cannot escape from the influence of the methods which have been provided for them ready made, and which they are incessantly engaged in practising.  This is not a peculiarity of the military profession in either branch—­it extends to nearly every calling; but in the profession specified, which is a service rather than a freely exercised profession, it is more prominent.  Human thought always has a tendency to run in grooves, and in military institutions the grooves are purposely made deep, and departure from them rigorously forbidden.  All exercises, even those designed to have the widest scope, tend to become mere drill.  Each performance produces, and bequeaths for use on the next occasion, a set of customary methods of execution which are readily adopted by the subsequent performers.  There grows up in time a kind of body of customary law governing the execution of peace operations—­the principles being peace-operation principles wholly and solely—­which law few dare to disobey, and which eventually obtains the sanction of official written regulations.  As Scharnhorst, quoted by Baron von der Goltz, said, ’We have begun to place the art of war higher than military virtues.’  The eminent authority who thus expressed himself wrote the words before the great catastrophe of Jena; and, with prophetic insight sharpened by his fear of the menacing tendency of peace-training formalism and unreality, added his conviction that ’this has been the ruin of nations from time immemorial.’

Independently of the evidence of history already adduced, it would be reasonable to conclude that the tendency is strengthened and made more menacing when the service in which it prevails becomes more highly specialised.  If custom and regulation leave little freedom of action to the individual members of an armed force, the difficulty—­sure to be experienced by them—­of shaking themselves clear of their fetters when the need for doing so arises is increased.  To realise—­when peace is broken—­the practical conditions of war demands an effort of which the unfettered intelligence alone seems capable.  The great majority of successful leaders in war on both elements have not been considerably, or at all, superior in intellectual acuteness to numbers of their fellows; but they have had strength of character, and their minds were not squeezed in a mould into a commonplace and uniform pattern.