Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battle

Napoleon has said that in war the moral element is to all others as three is to one. Moreover, as du Picq impressively demonstrates, while all other circumstances change with time, the human element remains the same, capable of just so much endurance, sacrifice, effort, and no more. Thus, from Caesar to Foch, the essential factor in war endures unmodified. And it is not the value of du Picq's book, as an explanation of the disasters of 1870, but of the triumphs of 1914-18, which gives it present and permanent interest. It is not as the forecast of why Bazaine, a type of all French commanders of the Franco-Prussian War, will fail, but why Foch, Joffre, will succeed, that the volume invites reading to-day. Beyond all else, the arresting circumstances in the fragmentary pages, perfect in themselves but incomplete in the conception of their author, is the intellectual and the moral kinship they reveal between the soldier who fell just before the crowning humiliation of Gravelotte and the victor Champenoise, the Yser and the colossal conflict of 1918 to which historians have already applied the name of the Battle of France, rightly to suggest its magnitude. Read the hastily compiled lectures of Foch, the teacher of de Guerre, recall the fugitive but impressive words of Foch, the soldier, uttered on the spur of the moment, filled with homely phrase, and piquant figure and underlying all, one encounters the same integral conception of war and of the relation of the moral to the physical, which fills the all too scanty pages of du Picq.

About the Author :
Charles Jean Jacques Joseph Ardant du Picq (19 October 1821 - 18 August 1870) was a French Army officer and military theorist of the mid-nineteenth century whose writings, as they were later interpreted by other theorists, had a great effect on French military theory and doctrine. Ardant du Picq was born at Périgueux in the Dordogne on 19 October 1821. On 1 October 1844, upon graduation from the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, he was commissioned a sublieutenant in the 67th. As a captain, he saw action in the French expedition to Varna (April-June 1853) during the Crimean War, but he fell ill and was shipped home. Upon recovery, he rejoined his regiment in front of Sevastopol (September). Transferred to the 9th Chasseurs a Pied battalion December 1854, he was captured during the storming of the central bastion of Sevastopol in September 1855. He was released in December 1855 and returned to active duty. As a major with the 16th Chasseur Battalion, Ardant du Picq served in Syria from August 1860 to June 1861 during the French intervention to restore order during Maronite-Druze sectarian violence. Like virtually all his peers, he also saw extensive service in Algeria (1864-66), and in February 1869 was appointed colonel of the 10th Line Infantry Regiment. He was in France at the outbreak of war with Prussia on 15 July 1870 and took command of his regiment, the Tenth Regiment of the Line.[2] He died on 18 August 1870 at the military hospital in Metz, from wounds received at the Battle of Mars-la-Tour