To speak of the importance of a sense of humor would be unavailing if it were not that what cramps so many men isn't that they are by nature humorless but that they are hesitant to exercise what humor they possess. Within the military profession, it is as unwise as to let the muscles go soft and to spare the mind the strain of original thinking. Great humor has always been in the military tradition. The need of it is nowhere more delicately expressed than in Kipling's lines: My son was killed while laughing at some jest, I would I knew What it was, and it might serve me in a time When jests are few. Marcus Aurelius, Rome's soldier philosopher, spoke of his love for the man who "could be humorous in an agreeable way." No reader of Grant's _Memoirs_ (one of the few truly great autobiographies ever written by a soldier) could fail to be impressed by his light touch. A delicate sense of the incongruous seems to have pervaded him; he is at his whimsical best when he sees himself in a ridiculous light. Lord Kitchener, one of the grimmest warriors ever to serve the British Empire, warmed to the man who made him the butt of a practical joke. There is the unforgettable picture of Admiral Beatty at Jutland. The _Indefatigable_ has disappeared beneath the waves. The _Queen Mary_ had exploded. The _Lion_ was in flames. Then word came that the _Princess Royal_ was blown up. Said Beatty to his Flag Captain "Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our ... ships today. Turn two points nearer the enemy." Admiral Nimitz, surveying the terrible landscape of the Kwajalein battlefield for the first time, said gravely to his Staff: "It's the worst devastation I've ever seen except for that last Texas picnic in Honolulu." There is a characteristic anecdote of General Patton. He had just been worsted by higher headquarters in an argument over strategy. So he sat talking to his own Staff about it, his dog curled up beside him. Suddenly he said to the animal: "The trouble with you, too, Willy, is that you don't understand the big picture." General Eisenhower, probably more than any other American commander, had the art of winning with his humor. He would have qualified under Sydney Smith's definition: "The meaning of an extraordinary man is that he is eight men in one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as brilliant as if he were irretrievably ruined."