ations for war."--The
Archduke Charles of Austria.)

They were in fact ignorant--and how many statesmen, and even
soldiers, are in like case?--that strategy, the art of manoeuvring
armies, is an art in itself, an art which none may master by the
light of nature, but to which, if he is to attain success, a man must
serve a long apprenticeship.

The rules of strategy are few and simple. They may be learned in a
week. They may be taught by familiar illustrations or a dozen
diagrams. But such knowledge will no more teach a man to lead an army
like Napoleon than a knowledge of grammar will teach him to write
like Gibbon. Lincoln, when the army he had so zealously toiled to
organise, reeled back in confusion from Virginia, set himself to
learn the art of war. He collected, says his biographer, a great
library of military books; and, if it were not pathetic, it would be
almost ludicrous, to read of the great President, in the midst of his
absorbing labours and his ever-growing anxieties, poring night after
night, when his capital was asleep, over the pages of Jomini and
Clausewitz. And what was the result? In 1864, when Grant was
appointed to the command of the Union armies, he said: "I neither ask
nor desire to know anything of your plans. Take the responsibility
and act, and call on me for assistance." He had learned at last that
no man is a born strategist.

The mistakes of Lincoln and Stanton are not to be condoned by
pointing to McClellan.

McClellan designed the plan for the invasion of Virginia, and the
plan failed. But this is not to say that the plan was in itself a bad
one. Nine times out of ten it would have succeeded. In many respects
it was admirable. It did away with a long line of land
communications, passing through a hostile country. It brought the
naval power of the Federals into combination with the military. It
secured two great waterways, the York and the James, by which the
army could be easily supplied, which required no guards, and by which
heavy ordnance could be brought up to bombard the fortifications of
Richmond. But it had one flaw. It left Washington, in the opinion of
the President and of the nation, insecure; and this flaw, which would
have escaped the notice of an ordinary enemy, was at once detected by
Lee and Jackson. Moreover, had McClellan been left in control of the
whole theatre of war, Jackson's manoeuvres would probably have failed
to produce so decisive an effect. The fight at Ke