Excerpt from The Applied Theory of Accounts
Just before the dawn of the French Revolution, there was, at the Military College of Brienne, a young student whom his classmates called the "Visionary." Never mixing in their noisy pastimes, he would spend hour after hour in his room, drilling tin soldiers on a large table. Dirt, sand, and pieces of glass became hills, fields, and rivers; twigs picked up in the playground were his cannon, while leaves, planted straight in the sand, were to him as forests. His tin soldiers were red or blue; some were mounted, and others, on foot. Night after night, while his comrades slept, the "Visionary" would pitch the blue soldiers against the red; the cannon would roar, and infantry and cavalry, pushed by his thin fingers, would fall dead on the battle-field.
A few years later, when the English fleet blockaded the port of Toulon, and threatened the existence of the Revolutionary Government, the visionary youth, now an officer in the army of France, pitched his "theoretical" knowledge against the "practical" knowledge of men who had grown gray under the soldier's uniform, and to their astonishment, and to the dismay of the invader, he discovered the one strategic point which rendered a battery of artillery so effective as to compel the immediate retirement of the enemy's fleet.
The young officer of artillery knew nothing of warfare but its theory; yet he succeeded where practical strategists had stood in impotent rage.
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