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ng with the main personalities, learn from them about the facilities for processing copy, and soak up everything they have to say about private and professional procedures. Then as the ropes grow gradually familiar in the grasp, confidence and nervous energy come flooding back. Surely there is a close parallel between this experience and that of the journeyman moving from the familiar soil of civilianism to the _terra incognita_ of military life. But there is also the marked difference that everyone he meets can tell him something that he needs to know. More particularly, if he has the ambition to excel as a commander of men, rather than as a technician, then the study of human nature and of individual characteristics within the military crowd become a major part of his training. That is the prime reason why the life of any tactical leader becomes so very interesting, provided he possesses some imagination. Everything is grist for his mill. Moreover, despite the wholesale transformation in the scientific and industrial aspects of war, there has been no revolution in the one thing that counts most. Ardant du Picq's words, "The heart of man does not change," are as good now as when he said them in an earlier period of war. Whatever one learns for certain about the nature of man as a fighting animal can be filed for ready reference; the hour will come when it will be useful. We have emphasized the value of becoming curious, and of asking questions about what one doesn't know, and have said that even when the questions are a little on the dumb side, it does no harm. But the ice gets very thin at one point. The same question asked over and again, like the same error made more than once, will grate the nerves of any superior. It is the mark of inattention, and the beginning of that "tissue of things neglected and things done amiss" which put Stevenson's oddball character in the ditch. When an officer lets words go in one ear and out the other like water off a duck's back, to quote the Dutch janitor, he is chasing rainbows by rubbing fur in the wrong direction. Ideally, an officer should be able to do the work of any man serving under him. There are even some command situations in which the ideal becomes altogether attainable, and a wholly practicable objective. For it may be said without qualification, that if he not only has this capability, but demonstrates it, so that his men begin to understand that he is thoroughl
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