Battle Studies

Battle Studies

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by Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq Copyright
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Title: Battle Studies
Author: Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7294] [This file was first posted

on April 8, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, BATTLE
STUDIES ***

Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team

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, Pétain 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 Fère 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 École 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