It is clear that, in order to be skilful in strategy (in fact, in any intellectual art), not only must a man have its scientific principles firmly imprinted on his mind, but he must make its practice so thoroughly familiar to his mental muscles that he can use strategy as a trained soldier uses his musket—­automatically.  Inasmuch as any man requires years of study and practice—­say, of chess—­in order to play chess well enough to compete successfully with professional chess-players, it seems to follow that any man must require years of study and practice of the more complicated game of strategy, in order to play strategy well enough to compete successfully with professional strategists.  The game of chess looks easy to a beginner; in fact, the kind of game that he thinks chess to be is easy.  But after he has learned the moves, he finds the intricacies of the game developing more rapidly than he can master them, and discovers that chess is a game which some men spend their lifetime studying.  The full realization of this fact, however, does not come to him until after defeats by better players have forced into his consciousness the almost infinite number of combinations possible, the difficulty of deciding on the correct move at any juncture, and the consequences that follow after wrong moves.

So with strategy.  The ease and certainty with which orders can be transmitted and received, the precision with which large forces can be quickly despatched from place to place, and the tremendous power exertable by those forces, tend to blind the mind to the fact that transferring any force to any place is merely making a “move,” and that the other player can make moves, too.  If a man were never to be pitted in strategy against another player, either in games or in actual war, the “infinite variety” of strategy would never be disclosed to his intelligence; and after learning how to make the moves, he might feel willing to tackle any one.  Illustrations of this tendency by people of great self-confidence are numerous in history, and have not been missing even in the present war, though none have been reported in this country as occurring on the Teuton side.  There has always been a tendency on the part of a ruling class to seize opportunities for military glory, and the ambition has often been disproportioned to the accompanying ability and knowledge—­sometimes on the part of a King, prince, or man of high nobility, sometimes on the part of a minister, sometimes on the part of an army or navy man, who has been indebted to political or social influence for his place.  But within the past fifty years, especially since the establishment of the General Staff in Prussia and the studies of Von Moltke, the overshadowing importance of strategy has been understood, the necessity of comprehending its principles and practising its technic has been appreciated, and attempts to practise strategy by persons inexpert in strategy have been deprecated.