My game is just as good as their game, and saner by reason of its size.  Here is War, done down to rational proportions, and yet out of the way of mankind, even as our fathers turned human sacrifices into the eating of little images and symbolic mouthfuls.  For my own part, I am prepared.  I have nearly five hundred men, more than a score of guns, and I twirl my moustache and hurl defiance eastward from my home in Essex across the narrow seas.  Not only eastward.  I would conclude this little discourse with one other disconcerting and exasperating sentence for the admirers and practitioners of Big War.  I have never yet met in little battle any military gentleman, any captain, major, colonel, general, or eminent commander, who did not presently get into difficulties and confusions among even the elementary rules of the Battle.  You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realise just what a blundering thing Great War must be.

Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion.  Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—­the available heads we have for it, are too small.  That, I think, is the most pacific realisation conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.

APPENDIX

LITTLE WARS AND KRIEGSPIEL

This little book has, I hope, been perfectly frank about its intentions.  It is not a book upon Kriegspiel.  It gives merely a game that may be played by two or four or six amateurish persons in an afternoon and evening with toy soldiers.  But it has a very distinct relation to Kriegspiel; and since the main portion of it was written and published in a magazine, I have had quite a considerable correspondence with military people who have been interested by it, and who have shown a very friendly spirit towards it—­in spite of the pacific outbreak in its concluding section.  They tell me—­what I already a little suspected—­ that Kriegspiel, as it is played by the British Army, is a very dull and unsatisfactory exercise, lacking in realism, in stir and the unexpected, obsessed by the umpire at every turn, and of very doubtful value in waking up the imagination, which should be its chief function.  I am particularly indebted to Colonel Mark Sykes for advice and information in this matter.  He has pointed out to me the possibility of developing Little Wars into a vivid and inspiring Kriegspiel, in which the element of the umpire would be reduced to a minimum; and it would be ungrateful to him, and a waste of an interesting opportunity, if I did not add this Appendix, pointing out how a Kriegspiel of real educational value for junior officers may be developed out of the amusing methods of Little War.  If Great War is to be played at all, the better it is played the