But West Point sets the stamp on the American army, and Sandhurst and Woolwich, the engineering and artillery school, on the British army.  At the end of the four years at West Point the men who survive the hard course may be tried by courtmartial not for conduct unbecoming an officer, but an officer and a gentleman.  They are supposed, whatever their origin, to have absorbed certain qualities, if they were not inborn, which are not easily described but which we all recognize in any man.  If they are absent it is not the fault of West Point; and if a man cannot acquire them there, then nature never meant them for him.  From the time he entered the school the government has paid his way; and he is cared for until he dies, if he keeps step and avoids courtmartials.

His position in life is secure.  His pay, counting everything, is better than that of the average graduate of a university or a first-class professional school who practises a profession.  Yet only three boys, I remember, wanted to go to West Point from our congressional district in my youth.  Nothing could better illustrate the fact that we are not a military people.  From West Point they go out to the little army which is to fight our wars; to the posts and the Philippines, and become a world in themselves; an isolated caste in spite of themselves.  I am not at all certain that either the British or the American officer works as hard as the German in time of peace.  Neither has the practical incentive nor the determined driver behind him.

For it takes a soldier Secretary of War to drive a soldier; for example, Lord Kitchener.  Those British officers who applied themselves in peace to the mastery of their profession and were not content with the day’s routine requirements, had to play chess without chessmen; practise manoeuvres on a board rather than with brigades, divisions, corps, and armies.  They became the rallying points in the concourse of untrained recruits.

German and French officers had the incentive and the chessmen.  The Great War could not take them by surprise.  They took the road with a machine whose parts had been long assembled.  They had been trained for big war; their ambition and intelligence were under the whip of a definite anticipation.

A factor overlooked, but even more significant than training or staff work, was that what might be called martial team-play had become an instinct with the continental peoples through the necessity of their situation.  This the Japanese also possess.  It is the right material ready to hand for the builder.  Not that it is the kind of material one admires; but it is the right material for making a war-machine.  One had only to read the expert military criticism in the British and the American Press at the outset of the war to realize how vague was the truth of the continental situation to the average Englishman or American—­but not to the trained British Staff.