If one takes a map of France and picks out the twenty stations of the various army corps scattered throughout the country, and then if one realises the numbers of men actually serving that these stations represent, one will see that it is quite impossible that all the army corps of the country should make a point of undergoing their manoeuvres as one united body. The disturbance inflicted from a civilian point of view on the area chosen would be enormous, and the result of no more value as regards the training of officers and men than when two or three army corps conduct their mimic warfare together. Certainly more than one army corps should be engaged in an annual set of manoeuvres. For instance, if one took Lyons as the station concerned, and assumed that the army corps stationed at Lyons conducted its manoeuvres year after year independently of those army corps which have their head-quarters at other centres, it would be easily understood that the army corps with head-quarters at Lyons would, to a certain extent, get into a rule-of-thumb way of working, and would fail to keep itself abreast of the various discoveries that are constantly being made by all sorts and conditions of commanders in the art of war. It is essential that units should as far as possible be able to interchange ideas, and learn new ways from each other, for war is a business in which, given forces of equal strength, the most intelligently controlled army wins. The manoeuvre areas of France are many. There are stretches of hill country like the district of the Vosges; forest stretches like the Ardennes in which the French Army has recently conducted some of its stiffest fights; great open plains like that which lies about Châlons, or like the Breton _Landes_; and river basins of diversified country, giving reaches of hill, valley and woodland, and most useful of all from a military educational point of view, since they afford training in practically all branches of the soldier's work.