"'To conquer is to advance,' de Maistre said one day, puzzled at this phenomenon of victory. The author of "Etudes sur le Combat" says more simply: 'To conquer is to be sure to overcome.' In fine, it is the mind that wins battles, that will always win them, that always has won them throughout the world's history. The spirituality, the moral quality of war, has not changed since those times. Mechanics, modern arms, all the artillery invented by man and his science, will not make an end to this thing, so lightly considered at the moment and called the human soul. Books like that of Ardant du Picq prevent it from being disdained. If no other effect should be produced by this sublime book, this one thing would justify it. But there will be others--do not doubt it--I wish merely to point out the sublimity of this didactic book which, for me, has wings like celestial poetry and which has carried me above and far away from the materialistic abjectness of my time. The technique of tactics and the science of war are beyond my province. I am not, like the author, erudite on maneuvers and the battle field. But despite my ignorance of things exclusively military, I have felt the truth of the imperious demonstrations with which it is replete, as one feels the presence of the sun behind a cloud. His book has over the reader that moral ascendancy which is everything in war and which determines success, according to the author. This ascendancy, like truth itself, is the sort which cannot be questioned. Coming from the superior mind of a leader who inspires faith it imposes obedience by its very strength. Colonel Ardant du Picq was a military writer only, with a style of his own. He has the Latin brevity and concentration. He retains his thought, assembles it and always puts it out in a compact phrase like a cartridge. His style has the rapidity and precision of the long-range arms which have dethroned the bayonet. He would have been a writer anywhere. He was a writer by nature. He was of that sacred phalanx of those who have a style all to themselves." Barbey d'Aurevilly rebels against tedious technicalities. Carried away by the author's historical and philosophical faculties, he soars without difficulty to the plane of Ardant du Picq. In like manner, du Picq ranges easily from the most mediocre military operations to the analysis of the great functions of policy of government and the evolution of nations. Who could have unraveled with greater finesse the causes of the insatiable desires of conquest by the new power which was so desirous of occupying the leading role on the world's stage? If our diplomats, our ministers and our generals had seized the warning of 1866, the date of the defeat of Austria, it is possible that we might have been spared our own defeats.