When I was recovering from a wound in my leg, I attended for two weeks our staff college. This college was well conceived and did excellent work, but nowhere were more evident the grievous faults of our unpreparedness. A good staff officer should have had practical experience with troops. If he has not had this experience he takes the thumb rules too literally and does not realize that they are simply rules to govern in general. We had practically no officers with this experience. The result was that the students, good fellows, most of them men who had never been in action, attached too much importance to the figures and did not realize it was the theory that was important. Infantry, according to staff problems, always marches four kilometers an hour. March graphics are drawn with columns which clear points, with three hundred meters to spare between them and the head of the next column after both columns have marched ten kilometers to the point of junction. No account is taken of the fact that rarely, if ever, does infantry exceed in rate of march three and one half kilometers under the ordinary conditions prevailing in France, and that bad weather, bad roads, etc., bring it to three kilometers. What a commanding officer of troops must bear in mind is not simply getting his troops to a given point, but getting them to that given point in such shape that they are able to perform the task set them when they arrive. Furthermore, roads given on the map are accepted with the sublime faith of a child. I remember once having my regiment on the march for twelve hours because the trail on which we had all been ordered to proceed necessitated the men going single file, and the infantry of a division single file stretches out indefinitely.