When the concentration has been ordered, and while the armies are in movement, come the first collisions, following one another in quick succession. Every day brings its surprises, even to the best informed and best prepared headquarters. The strategist's equilibrium must be disturbed as little by unexpected events as by the throbs of national emotion. He must prepare the way for a decisive battle. No one knows better than he the terrible nature of the sacrifices which it will involve, and the stakes which are risked upon its issue. The lives of thousands will be lost; many thousands will be wounded; a mistake, miscalculation, or mishap may lead to defeat, with far-reaching, perhaps disastrous, consequences to his country. But under the weight of this vast responsibility the strategist's judgment must work smoothly and easily, like the compass in a storm, with no derangement of its delicate equipoise. The man whose insight remains clear, whose judgment retains its even balance, when the greater part of mankind are stunned with the awe of great events, who remains true to himself while others are carried away by what seems an irresistible current, is not cast in the common mould. Ordinary men shrink into insignificance beside him. He is separated from the average officer by a gulf which no system of training can bridge. The inner calm which neither great occurrences, nor danger, nor responsibility can disturb cannot be imparted, and no method can be prescribed for its acquisition. The natural place for a leader of men is in the supreme command. Where a general of this type is at the head of an army he will himself superintend the work of strategical preparation such as is carried on in the office of the great general staff at Berlin. His chief of the staff will be a confidential assistant, whose main function will be to lighten for him the burden of detail, and the two men will stand to one another in the same relation as that which subsists between the general commanding an army corps and the chief of the general staff of the corps.