s
campagnes, seront la meilleure Ecole pour apprendre et par
consequent pour enseigner la grande guerre: _la science des
generaux._" Grandes Operations Militaires, vol. i. p. 7.] It was the
very simplicity of the principles that made many successful generals
question whether there was any art in the matter, except to use
courage and natural sagacity in the actual situation in which the
commander found himself and the enemy. Marshal Saxe asserted in his
"Reveries" that down to his time there had been no formulation of
principles, and that if any had been recognized as such in the minds
of commanders of armies, they had not made it known. [Footnote:
Jomini, in the work already cited, quotes Marshal Saxe thus: "Que
toutes les sciences avaient des principes, mais que la guerre seule
n'en avait point encore; si ces principes ont existe dans la tete de
quelques generaux, nulle part ils n'ont ete indiques ou developpes."
The same idea has been put quite as trenchantly by one of the most
recent writers of the English Army, Colonel J. F. Maurice, R. A.
Professor in the Farnborough Staff College. In the able article on
"War" in the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he says,
"it must be emphatically asserted that there does not exist, and
never except by pedants of whom the most careful students of war are
more impatient than other soldiers, has there ever been supposed to
exist, an 'art of war' which was something other than the methodic
study of military history."]

It was precisely in this department of military history "raisonnee"
that frontier garrison life shut the young army officer out from the
opportunities of profiting by his leisure. The valuable books were
all foreign publications in costly form with folio atlases, and were
neither easy to procure nor easily carried about with the limited
means and the rigid economy of transportation which marked army life
in the far West. That this was true even in the artillery is
indicated by General Gibbon before the Committee on the Conduct of
the War when questioned in reference to the relative amount of
artillery used at Gettysburg as compared with great European
battles; that distinguished officer having himself been in the
artillery when the Civil War began. [Footnote: "Question. You have
studied the history of battles a great deal: Now, in the battles of
Napoleon, had they at any time half as many artillery engaged as
there were at Gettysburg? Answer. I am not s