The Russo-Japanese War has demonstrated that military science is as much more complex and difficult to-day than during our Civil War, as it was then more complicated than in the time of battle-ax and lance.  The recent conflict in Asia shows that it is as important to get wounded men cured and back on the firing line as it is to punish the other side.  A nation that would now enter into armed conflict without a general staff or some similar body of men would be hurling its soldiers, however brave, to certain death.

And yet Von Moltke, Germany’s greatest captain, originated the modern general staff; and the United States, with all of our American progressiveness, had no general staff at all until Secretary Root prevailed upon Congress to provide one.  These general staffs plan, during the long years of peace, every possible conflict.  They map out with absolute accuracy every imaginable field of operations in the country of every possible enemy; they equip the general in the field with information on all subjects, perfect to the smallest detail.

Japan’s general staff has been preparing day and night for the present war for every month of every year of an entire decade.  Oyama’s victories were ripening in the brain of this modern Attila for ten long years.  Von Moltke had thought out the conquest of France years before fate blew the trumpet that set the tremendous enginery of his plans in motion.  Yes, but these men kept thinking, thinking.

Nobody heard them saying that all great wars had been fought.  Perhaps they did not know whether all wars had been fought or not; but they knew this:  That if any future wars were to be fought, those wars would be bigger than any conflict that had gone before, and that their armies would have to be handled with greater precision, and their tactics would have to be more daring than even those of Napoleon, or Hannibal, or Caesar.

Very well, the Franco-Prussian War did come.  The Russo-Japanese War did come.  And when the time for these dread duels between peoples arrived, those men were in the saddle.  Battles whose red desperation have made the world’s historic combats look small, have within a year taught all men that the art of war requires as much original thinking as it did when the Corsican overwhelmed the muddled military minds of Europe, weakened and palsied by the belief that nothing more was to be learned in warfare.

Manchuria’s awful lesson teaches you, young man, that the profession of arms, dreadful as it is honorable, holds out to you all the possibilities by which every great captain of history made his name immortal.

“I think the statesmanship of Joseph Chamberlain is the most comprehensive and instructive since that of Bismarck,” said a passenger on an ocean steamer to an Englishman of considerable distinction in the world of letters.

“I fail to see the statesmanship,” said the latter; “will you kindly point it out?”