Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FOCH'S FIRST PRINCIPLES OF WAR Foce was in command at the Ecole de Guerre for the four years from 1907 to 1911. Once more some hundreds of officers—who were to be among the leaders of the French army in the Great War that was now so near at hand—came under his inspiring influence. The professors, who formed his staff, had been his pupils. His two published works were used as authoritative text books. We may proceed to an examination of these masterly treatises, which have a twofold interest. For they not only set forth those principles of the art of war, which he was before long to illustrate by his own brilliant leadership in the field, but they also in many ways reveal the character of their author. His Principes de la Guerre appeared, as we have already noted, in 1903; his second work, De la Con- duite de la Guerre, in 1905. / At the very outset, Foch warns the reader of his Principes that the book is not meant to be a complete treatise on war, but a discussion of some of its principles from a practical point of view. The author of a very remarkable essay on the same subject, published in the " Journal of the Royal United Service Institution " during the war, notices that on the first page of the " FieldService Regulations of the British Army " we are told that:— " The fundamental principles of war are neither very numerous nor in themselves very abstruse, but the application of them is difficult and cannot be made subject to rules. The correct application of principles to circumstances is the outcome of sound military knowledge, built up by study and practice until it has become an instinct." And he then remarks that throughout the rest of the book no further reference is made to those principles, and there is no attempt even to enumerate them.... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.