who has kept his nerve. Land battles, as to
the fighting part, are won by the intrepidity of men in grade from
private to captains mainly. Fear is contagious but courage is not less
so. The courage of any one man reflects in some degree the courage of
all those who are within his vision. To the man who is in terror and
bordering on panic, no influence can be more steadying than that of
seeing some other man near him who is retaining self-control and doing
his duty.

The paralysis which comes of fear can be lifted only through the
resumption of action which will again give individuals the feeling of
organization. This does not mean ordering a bayonet charge, or the
firing of a volley at such-and-such o'clock. It may mean only patting
one man on the back, "talking it up" to a couple of others, sending
someone out to find a flank, or turning one's self to dig-in, while
passing the word to others to do likewise. This is action in the
realest sense of the term. _Out of reinvigorating men toward the
taking of many small actions develops the possibility of large and
decisive action._ The unit must first find itself before doing an
effective job of finding the enemy. Out of those acts which are
incidental to the establishing of order, a leader reaffirms his own
power of decision.

Such things are elementary, and of the very nature of the fire fight.
While there is much more to be said about the play of moral forces in
the trial and success of the group under combat conditions, most of it
is to be learned from other sources, and it is the duty of every
officer to study all that he can of this subject, and apply it to what
he does in his daily rounds.

_There is no rule pertaining to the moral unifying of military forces
under the pressures of the battlefield which is not equally good in
the training which conditions troops for this eventuality._ For the
group to feel a great spiritual solidarity, and for its members to be
bound together by mutual confidence and the satisfactions of a
rewarding comradeship, is the foundation of great enterprise. But it
is not more than that. Unaccompanied by a strengthening of the
military virtues and a rise in the martial spirit, a friendly unity
will not of itself point men directly toward the main object in
training, nor enable them to dispose themselves efficiently toward
each other on entering battle.

It does not make the military man less an agent of peace and more a
militarist that