he shadow for the substance.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MORALE

To grow in knowledge of how to win a loyal and willing response from
military forces, there must first be understanding of the springs of
human action, what they are, and how they may be directed toward
constructive ends. This done, the course which makes for the
perfecting of forces during peacetime training need only be extended
to harden them for the risk and stress of war.

The mainspring is morale. The meaning of the word is already known in
a general way to every man who has qualified for officership, so it is
hardly necessary to redefine it. A World War II bluejacket said it
this way: "Morale is when your hands and feet keep working when your
head says it can't be done." That says it just as well as anything
written by du Picq or Baron von Steuben. Nothing new need be added.

The handiest beginning is to consider morale in conjunction with
discipline, since in military service they are opposite sides of the
same coin. When one is present, the other will be also. But the
instilling of these things in military forces depends upon leadership
understanding the nature of the relationship.

As to discipline, until recent years, military forces tended to stress
the pattern rather than the ideal. The elder Moltke, one of the great
masters of the military art, taught his troops that it was of supreme
importance that they form accurately in training, since the perfection
of their formations would determine their efficiency in battle. Yet in
the Franco-Prussian War, these formations proved utterly unsuited to
the heavily wooded terrain of the theater, and new ones had to be
devised on the spur of the moment.

This is the familiar story. It was repeated by United States forces in
World War II during the Normandy hedgerow fighting and the invasions
of the Central Pacific atolls. Troops had to learn the hard way how to
hit, and how to survive, in moving through jungle or across the
mountains and desert. When that happened, the only disciplinary
residue which mattered was obedience to orders. The movements they had
learned by rote were of less value than the spiritual bond between one
man and another. The most valuable lesson was that of mutual support.
And unless this lesson was supported by confidence in the judgment of
those in authority, it is to be doubted that they were helped at all.

Finally, that confidence is the _sine qua non_ of all useful milit