Excerpt from The Evolution of Modern Strategy: From the Xviith Century to the Present Time
For the last twenty-five years I have formed one of a group of British officers who have been as intensely keen to fit themselves for command, and to prepare the men under them for War, as any men in any nation under the sun. This group was, and still is, far more numerous than the British public imagines, and those members of it, who have been fortunate enough to obtain and to recognise their opportunities, have won for themselves the respect and admiration of all competent critics, of whom, unfortunately, there are few enough within our own islands.
Wherever men met, in clubs, messes, railway carriages - particularly railway carriages - we foregathered and talked, not "shop" but "War," with the single, whole-souled idea of being ready when the call should come, and so far from finding that this interest in our duty was considered "bad form," I, at least, personally found that it made me everywhere a welcome guest. As, in addition to my own, I was a dining member of seventeen different messes of all arms, and besides my club in town, belonged to half a dozen others in different parts of the world, I think I may claim abundant opportunity for the formation of my opinion.
Many of us had enjoyed, or rather made for ourselves, opportunities for becoming acquainted with foreign armies, and in proportion as to the use they had made of their time, they brought into the service a different attitude towards the fundamental considerations which lie at the base of all warlike operations than that which had hitherto prevailed amongst the senior officers.
Those who had fought through such campaigns as those against the Sikhs", the Crimea, and the Mutiny, saw in Warfare only the collision of the rival interests of governments, in which armies alone were concerned, and in which the nations, as nations, had but little interest - the old eighteenth-century standpoint, in fact, which survived quite naturally under the peculiar nature of our surroundings.
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