therefore 50 photographs.  These photographs, shown in appropriate succession, would furnish information analogous to the information imparted to a chess student by the statement of the successive moves in those games of chess that one sees sometimes in books on chess and in newspapers.  Now if the film photographs were so arranged that the moves in the approved solution of, say, problem 99 could be thrown on a screen, as slowly and as quickly as desired, and if the film records of a few hundred such games could be conveniently arranged, a very wide range of situations that would probably come up in war would be portrayed; and the moves made in handling those situations would form valuable precedents for action, whenever situations approximating them should come up in war.

It must be borne in mind that in actual life, our only real guide to wise action in any contingency that may arise is a memory, more or less consciously realized, of how a similar contingency has been met, successfully or unsuccessfully, in the past.  Perhaps most of us do not realize that it is not so much experience that guides us as our memory of experiences.  Therefore in the training of both officers and enlisted men in strategy, tactics, seamanship, gunnery, engineering, and the rest, the memory of how they, or some one else, did this well and that badly (even if the memory be hardly conscious) is the immediate agency for bringing about improvement.

Imagine now a strategical system of training for the navy, in which a body of highly trained officers at the department will continuously regulate the exercises of the fleet, guided by the revelations of the Kriegspiel: the commander-in-chief will direct the activities of the main divisions of the fleet, carrying out the department’s scheme; the commander of each division will regulate the activities of the units of his command in accordance with the fleet scheme; the officer in command of each unit of each division will regulate the activities of each unit in his ship, destroyer, submarine, or other craft in accordance with the division scheme; and every suborganization, in every ship, destroyer, or other craft will regulate likewise the activities of its members; so that the navy will resemble a vast and efficient organism, all the parts leagued together by a common understanding and a common purpose; mutually dependent, mutually assisting, sympathetically obedient to the controlling mind that directs them toward the “end in view.”

It must be obvious, however, that in order that the navy shall be like an organism, its brain (the General Staff) must not be a thing apart, but must be of it, and bound to every part by ties of sympathy and understanding.  It would be possible to have a staff excellent in many ways, and yet so out of touch with the fleet and its practical requirements that co-ordination between the two would not exist.  Analogous conditions are sometimes seen in people suffering from a certain class of nervous ailments; the mind seems unimpaired, but co-ordination between the brain and certain muscles is almost wholly lacking.