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TITLE: BATTLE STUDIES
AUTHOR: COLONEL CHARLES-JEAN-JACQUES-JOSEPH ARDANT DU PICQ
EBOOK: E07222 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

BATTLE STUDIES
ANCIENT AND MODERN BATTLE

BY COLONEL ARDANT DU PICQ
FRENCH ARMY

TRANSLATED FROM THE EIGHTH EDITION IN THE FRENCH BY

COLONEL JOHN N. GREELY
FIELD ARTILLERY, U.S. ARMY

AND MAJOR ROBERT C. COTTON
GENERAL STAFF (INFANTRY), U.S. ARMY
Joint Author of "Military Field Notebook"

1921

[Transcriber's note: Footnotes have been moved to the end of the book.]

[Illustration: COLONEL ARDANT DU PICQ]

[Illustration:
Letter from Marshal Foch to Major General A. W. Greely
Dated Malsherbe, October 23, 1920]

TRANSLATION OF A LETTER FROM MARSHAL FOCH TO MAJOR GENERAL A. W.
GREELY, DATED MALSHERBE, OCTOBER 23, 1920

   MY DEAR GENERAL:

   Colonel Ardant du Picq was the exponent of _moral force_, the
   most powerful element in the strength of armies. He has shown it to
   be the preponderating influence in the outcome of battles.

   Your son has accomplished a very valuable work in translating his
   writings. One finds his conclusions amply verified in the
   experience of the American Army during the last war, notably in the
   campaign of 1918.

   Accept, my dear General, my best regards.
   F. FOCH.

PREFACE

BY FRANK H. SIMONDS
Author of "History of the World War," "'They Shall Not Pass'--Verdun,"
Etc.

In presenting to the American reading public a translation of a volume
written by an obscure French colonel, belonging to a defeated army, who
fell on the eve of a battle which not alone gave France over to the
enemy but disclosed a leadership so inapt as to awaken the suspicion
of treason, one is faced by the inevitable interrogation--"Why?"

Yet the answer is simple. The value of the book of Ardant du Picq lies
precisely in the fact that it contains not alone the unmistakable
forecast of the defeat, itself, but a luminous statement of those
fundamental principles, the neglect of which led to Gravelotte and
Sedan.

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, Petain 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 of Fere 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 the Ecole
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.

"For me as a soldier," writes du Picq, "the smallest detail caught on
the spot and in the heat of action is more instructive than all the
Thiers and the Jominis in the world." Compare this with Foch
explaining to his friend Andre de Mariecourt, his own emotions at the
critical hour at Fere Champenoise, when he had to invent something new
to beguile soldiers who had retreated for weeks and been beaten for
days. His tactical problem remained unchanged, but he must give his
soldiers, tired with being beaten to the "old tune" a new air, which
would appeal to them as new, something to which they had not been
beaten, and the same philosophy appears.

Du Picq's contemporaries neglected his warning, they saw only the
outward circumstances of the Napoleonic and Frederican successes. In
vain du Picq warned them that the victories of Frederick were not the
logical outgrowth of the minutiae of the Potsdam parades. But du Picq
dead, the Third Empire fallen, France prostrated but not annihilated
by the defeats of 1870, a new generation emerged, of which Foch was
but the last and most shining example. And this generation went back,
powerfully aided by the words of du Picq, to that older tradition, to
the immutable principles of war.

With surprising exactness du Picq, speaking in the abstract, foretold
an engagement in which the mistakes of the enemy would be
counterbalanced by their energy in the face of French passivity, lack
of any control conception. Forty years later in the Ecole de Guerre,
Foch explained the reasons why the strategy of Moltke, mistaken in all
respects, failed to meet the ruin it deserved, only because at
Gravelotte Bazaine could not make up his mind, solely because of the
absence in French High Command of precisely that "Creed of Combat" the
lack of which du Picq deplored.

Of the value of du Picq's work to the professional soldier, I
naturally cannot speak, but even for the civilian, the student of
military events, of war and of the larger as well as the smaller
circumstances of battle, its usefulness can hardly be exaggerated.
Reading it one understands something, at least of the soul as well as
the science of combat, the great defeats and the great victories of
history seem more intelligible in simple terms of human beings. Beyond
this lies the contemporaneous value due to the fact that nowhere can
one better understand Foch than through the reading of du Picq.

By translating this volume of du Picq and thus making it available for
an American audience whose interest has been inevitably stirred by
recent events, the translators have done a public as well as a
professional service. Both officers enjoyed exceptional opportunities
and experiences on the Western front. Col. Greely from Cantigny to the
close of the battle of the Meuse-Argonne was not only frequently
associated with the French army, but as Chief of Staff of our own
First Division, gained a direct knowledge of the facts of battle,
equal to that of du Picq, himself.

On the professional side the service is obvious, since before the last
war the weakness of the American like the British Army, a weakness
inevitable, given our isolation, lay in the absence of adequate study
of the higher branches of military science and thus the absence of
such a body of highly skilled professional soldiers, as constituted
the French or German General Staff. The present volume is a clear
evidence that American officers themselves have voluntarily undertaken
to make good this lack.

On the non-professional side and for the general reader, the service
is hardly less considerable, since it supplies the least technically
informed with a simply comprehensible explanation of things which
almost every one has struggled to grasp and visualize during the last
six years extending from the battle of Marne in 1914 to that of the
Vistula in 1920.

Of the truth of this latter assertion, a single example will perhaps
suffice. Every forthcoming military study of the campaign of 1914
emphasizes with renewed energy the fact that underlying all the German
conceptions of the opening operations was the purpose to repeat the
achievement of Hannibal at Cannae, by bringing the French to battle
under conditions which should, on a colossal scale, reproduce those of
Hannibal's greatest victory. But nowhere better than in du Picq's
volume, are set forth the essential circumstances of the combat which,
after two thousand years gave to Field Marshal von Schlieffen the root
ideas for the strategy expressed in the first six weeks of 1914. And,
as a final observation, nowhere better than in du Picq's account, can
one find the explanation of why the younger Moltke failed in executing
those plans which gave Hannibal one of the most shining triumphs in
all antiquity.

Thus, although he died in 1870, du Picq lives, through his book, as
one of the most useful guides to a proper understanding of a war
fought nearly half a century later.

FRANK H. SIMONDS.

Snowville, New Hampshire,
October 15, 1920.

TRANSLATORS' NOTE

Colonel Ardant du Picq's "Battle Studies" is a French military
classic. It is known to every French army officer; it is referred to
as an established authority in such works as Marshal Foch's "The
Principles of War." It has been eagerly read in the original by such
American army officers as have chanced upon it; probably only the
scarcity of thinking men with military training has precluded the
earlier appearance of an American edition.

The translators feel that the war with Germany which brought with it
some military training for all the best brains of the country has
prepared the field for an American edition of this book. They are sure
that every American reader who has had actual battle experience in any
capacity will at some point say to himself, "That is absolutely
true...." or, "That reminds me of the day...."

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