The Brain of an Army: A Popular Account of the German General StaffWilkinson, Spenser
History
The Brain of an Army: A Popular Account of the German General Staff
Wilkinson, Spenser
Prussia (Germany). Armee. Grosser Generalstab
"The practice tour[8] with which the course terminates offers the
opportunity of testing the capacity, knowledge, and endurance of each
officer--of finding what he can do. Upon the basis of simple general
and special ideas, usually framed by the teacher who conducts the
exercise, the decisions of the general commanding and the general staff
officer's share in the measures adopted will be illustrated. For this
purpose it will be useful to form two sides, neither of which should,
as a rule, exceed the strength of an imaginary infantry division on a
war footing. The exercise should be so arranged as to occasion in turn
practice in formal work such as may promote facility in the issue of
orders and a knowledge of the arrangements of our army, discussions
upon the spot of tactical situations, analyses of the effects upon the
troops of dispositions given, and lastly, comprehensive examinations of
the situation presented by the campaign or battle. Each officer who
joins the tour should have the opportunity of grappling with as many as
possible of these various kinds of difficulties."
The advocates of original research as the true instrument of higher
education may not at first sight recognise their ideal in Moltke's
_Order of Teaching_. They may smile at an academy where natural
science and history are taught in lectures appealing only to the
intelligence and the memory. But the school at Berlin has a practical
aim. It is a school of war, and in all that relates to war the German
staff officer learns to apply that science which consists in the true
method of apprehending. Moreover, the _Order of Teaching_, like all
other German military regulations, does not fully reveal the
thoroughness of the work executed in obedience to its precepts. In
military history, for instance, it lays down that the third year's
course is to deal with "campaigns of the time of William I." This
phrase would be met by very superficial work. The letter would be
fulfilled by a perusal of a _précis_ of the campaigns of 1866 or of
1870. A study of one of these campaigns in the official history might
seem completely to fulfil the requirements. But in practice the
students at the Academy work out the selected campaign on a still wider
basis. In the probationary year which follows the Academy course they
are allowed access to the materials from which the staff histories were
written, and are expected to form their own judgment on the campaign
from the study of the original documents themselves. This is the very
ideal of the ideal professor of history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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