These illusions, nevertheless, stubborn and persistent, always repair the very next day the most damaging injuries inflicted on them by experience. Their least dangerous effect is to lead to prescribing the impractical, as if ordering the impractical were not really an attack on discipline, and did not result in disconcerting officers and men by the unexpected and by surprise at the contrast between battle and the theories of peacetime training. Battle, of course, always furnishes surprises. But it furnishes less in proportion as good sense and the recognition of truth have had their effect on the training of the fighting man, and are disseminated in the ranks. Let us then study man in battle, for it is he who really fights. CHAPTER I MAN IN PRIMITIVE AND ANCIENT COMBAT Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second. War between savage tribes, between Arabs, even today, [1] is a war of ambush by small groups of men of which each one, at the moment of surprise, chooses, not his adversary, but his victim, and is an assassin. Because the arms are similar on both sides, the only way of giving the advantage to one side is by surprise. A man surprised, needs an instant to collect his thoughts and defend himself; during this instant he is killed if he does not run away. The surprised adversary does not defend himself, he tries to flee. Face to face or body to body combat with primitive arms, ax or dagger, so terrible among enemies without defensive arms, is very rare. It can take place only between enemies mutually surprised and without a chance of safety for any one except in victory. And still ... in case of mutual surprise, there is another chance of safety; that of falling back, of flight on the part of one or the other; and that chance is often seized. Here is an example, and if it does not concern savages at all, but soldiers of our days, the fact is none the less significant. It was observed by a man of warlike temperament who has related what he saw with his own eyes, although he was a forced spectator, held to the spot by a wound.