e then put
into the General Staff, which is as truly a special corps as is
our construction corps. How closely this system is followed with
the General Staff in the German navy, the present writer does not
know exactly; but his information is that the system in the navy
is copied (though with certain modifications) after the system in
the army.

How can the General Staff at the Navy Department be trained? In the
same way as that in which officers at the war college are trained:
by study and by solving war problems by tactical and strategical
games. The training would naturally be more extended, as it would
be a postgraduate course.

There is a difference to be noted between games like war games in
which the mental powers are trained, and games like billiards, in
which the nerves and muscles receive practically all the training;
and the difference refers mainly to the memory. Games of cards are
a little like war games; and many books on games of cards have
been written, expounding the principles on which they rest and
giving rules to follow. These books may be said to embody a science
of card-playing.

No such book on naval strategy has appeared; and the obvious reason
is that only a few rules of naval strategy have been formulated.
Staff training, therefore, cannot be given wholly by studying books;
but possibly the scheme suggested to the department by the writer,
when he was Aid for Operations, may be developed into a sort of
illustrative literature, which can assist the memory.

By this scheme, a body of officers at the Navy Department would
occupy their time wholly in studying war problems by devising and
playing strategical and tactical games ashore and afloat. After
each problem had been solved to the satisfaction of the staff, each
distinctive situation in the approved solution would be photographed
in as small a space as practicable, preferably on a moving-picture
film. In the solution of problem 99; for instance, there might be
50 situations and therefore 50 photographs. These photographs,
shown in appropriate succession, would furnish information analogous
to the information imparted to a chess student by the statement of
the successive moves in those games of chess that one sees sometimes
in books on chess and in newspapers. Now if the film photographs
were so arranged that the moves in the approved solution of, say,
problem 99 could be thrown on a screen, as slowly and as quickly
as desired, and if th