a
thorough education in the practical duties of the General Staff, and not
merely in leading troops in action.

This reflection leads to the discussion of the momentous question how,
generally, the training of the superior officers for the great war
should be managed, and how the manoeuvres ought to be reorganized with a
view to the training. The essential contradiction between our obsolete
method of training and the completely altered demands of a new era
appears here with peculiar distinctness.

A large part of our superior commanders pass through the General Staff,
while part have attended at least the military academy; but when these
men reach the higher positions what they learnt in their youth has long
become out of date. The continuation school is missing. It can be
replaced only by personal study; but there is generally insufficient
time for this, and often a lack of interest. The daily duties of
training troops claim all the officer's energy, and he needs great
determination and love of hard work to continue vigorously his own
scientific education. The result is, that comparatively few of our
superior officers have a fairly thorough knowledge, much less an
independently thought out view, of the conditions of war on the great
scale. This would cost dearly in real war. Experience shows that it is
not enough that the officers of the General Staff attached to the leader
are competent to fill up this gap. The leader, if he cannot himself
grasp the conditions, becomes the tool of his subordinates; he believes
he is directing and is himself being directed. This is a far from
healthy condition. Our present manoeuvres are, as already mentioned,
only occasionally a school for officers in a strategical sense, and from
the tactical point of view they do not meet modern requirements. The
minor manoeuvres especially do not represent what is the most important
feature in present-day warfare--i.e., the sudden concentration of
larger forces on the one side and the impossibility, from space
considerations, of timely counter-movements on the other. The minor
manoeuvres are certainly useful in many respects. The commanders learn
to form decisions and to give orders, and these are two important
matters; but the same result would follow from manoeuvres on the grand
scale, which would also to some extent reproduce the modern conditions
of warfare.

Brigade manoeuvres especially belong to a past generation, and merely
encourage wr