This reflection leads to the discussion of the momentous question how, generally, the training of the superior officers for the great war should be managed, and how the manoeuvres ought to be reorganized with a view to the training.  The essential contradiction between our obsolete method of training and the completely altered demands of a new era appears here with peculiar distinctness.

A large part of our superior commanders pass through the General Staff, while part have attended at least the military academy; but when these men reach the higher positions what they learnt in their youth has long become out of date.  The continuation school is missing.  It can be replaced only by personal study; but there is generally insufficient time for this, and often a lack of interest.  The daily duties of training troops claim all the officer’s energy, and he needs great determination and love of hard work to continue vigorously his own scientific education.  The result is, that comparatively few of our superior officers have a fairly thorough knowledge, much less an independently thought out view, of the conditions of war on the great scale.  This would cost dearly in real war.  Experience shows that it is not enough that the officers of the General Staff attached to the leader are competent to fill up this gap.  The leader, if he cannot himself grasp the conditions, becomes the tool of his subordinates; he believes he is directing and is himself being directed.  This is a far from healthy condition.  Our present manoeuvres are, as already mentioned, only occasionally a school for officers in a strategical sense, and from the tactical point of view they do not meet modern requirements.  The minor manoeuvres especially do not represent what is the most important feature in present-day warfare—­i.e., the sudden concentration of larger forces on the one side and the impossibility, from space considerations, of timely counter-movements on the other.  The minor manoeuvres are certainly useful in many respects.  The commanders learn to form decisions and to give orders, and these are two important matters; but the same result would follow from manoeuvres on the grand scale, which would also to some extent reproduce the modern conditions of warfare.

Brigade manoeuvres especially belong to a past generation, and merely encourage wrong ideas.  All that the soldiers learn from them—­that is, fighting in the country—­can be taught on the army drill-grounds.  Divisional manoeuvres are still of some value even to the commanders.  The principles of tactical leadership in detail can be exemplified in them; but the first instructive manoeuvres in the modern sense are those of the army corps; still more valuable are the manoeuvres on a larger scale, in which several army corps are combined, especially when the operating divisions are considered part of one whole, and are compelled to act in connection with one grand general scheme of operation.  The great