is stripped away, and if we are allowed to understand that the wrong strategy is as fatal to us as the wrong prescription.

I believe that we will have to strip the false front from international diplomacy, from warfare, from all the inherited "mysteries" which are still pre-Revolutionary in essence. We will have to bring these things up to date because our lives depend on them, we can no longer depend on the strategy of Gustavus Adolphus or the diplomacy of Metternich. Five million soldiers in khaki, with a nation's life disrupted for their support, require a different strategy from that of Burgoyne's hired Hessians; and a hundred and thirty million individuals simply do not want the intrigue and Congress-dances diplomacy which traded territory, set up kings, and found pretexts for good wars.

We have destroyed a good deal of the mummery of economics—not without help; politics has become more familiar to us, we now know that a thief in office is a thief, that tariffs are not made by abstract thinkers, but by manufacturers and farmers and factory workers; we know, with some poignancy, that taxes are paid by people like ourselves and we are beginning to know that taxes are spent to keep people alive and healthy and in jobs and, to a minute extent, also to keep people cheerful, their minds alert, their spirits buoyant. The very fact that we are now all critics of spending is a great advance, because it means we are all paying; when we are all critics of foreign policy it will mean that we are all signing contracts with other nations; and when we are all critics of war, it will mean that we are all fighting.

As a student, I know what a layman can know about strategy; less about tactics; as a citizen I should be of greater service to my country if I knew more. What I have learned, from many sources, seems to hold together and to demonstrate one thing: behind strategy in the field is a strategy of a people in action; and victory comes to the leaders who organize and use the national forces in keeping with the national character.

I have gone to several authorities to discover whether the "tactics of variety" (a "natural" in propaganda) has any counterpart in the field. I cannot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a name for an attitude of mind; but I did find authority for the feeling that an American (or United Nations) strategy need not be—and must not be—the strategy of Hitler. So much the civilian can take to his bosom, for comfort.

A Variety of Strategies

The greatest comfort to myself was in a little book published just in time to corroborate a few guesses and immensely to widen my outlook; it is called Grand Strategy; the authors are H.A. Sargeaunt, a specialist in poison gas and tank design, a scientist and historian; and Geoffrey West, biographer and student of politics; both British. Although there are some difficult pages and some odd conclusions, this book is a revelation—particularly it shows the connection between war and the social conditions of nations making war; in the authors' own words, "war and society condition each other"; they connect war with progress and show how each nation can develop a strategy out of its own resources. The hint we all got at school, that the French revolution is responsible for vast civilian armies, is carried into a history of the nineteenth century—and into this war.

The authors have their own names for each kind of war—each is a "solution" to the problem of victory. Each adds a special factor to the body of strategy known at the time, and this added special factor rises from the country which uses it—from its methods of production, its education, its religion, its banking and commercial habits, and its whole social organization. Napoleon's solution was based on the revolutionary enthusiasm of the French people; he added zeal, the intense application of force, speed of movement, repeated hammering, throwing in reserves. All of these things demand devotion, patriotic self-sacrifice, and these qualities had been created, for the French, by the Republic; they were not qualities known to the mercenaries and small standing armies of Napoleon's enemies.

Against Napoleon's total use of the strategy of force, the British opposed a strength based on the way they lived; it was a sea-strength of blockade, but also on land they refused to accept the challenge of Napoleon. They would not come out (until they were ready at Waterloo) and let Napoleon find their weak spot for the exercise of his force. Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the turning point came years earlier at Torres Vedras in Spain; as Napoleon increased force, Wellington increased "persistence"; it is called the "strategy of attrition" and it means that Wellington's "aim was to wear down the enemy troops by inducing them to attack [where Wellington] could withdraw to take up positions and fight again."

Today, getting news of a campaign like Wellington's in Spain, the average man would repeatedly read and hear headlines of retreat; he would get the impression of an uninterrupted series of defeats. But the Peninsular War was actually a triumph for British arms. It was a triumph because Wellington refused to fight in any way not natural to the British; his masterly retreats did not disturb the "inborn toughness and phlegm, that saving lack of imagination" which makes the British, as these British authors say, "good at retreats". Moreover, this war of slow retreats gave Britain time to develop a tremendous manufacturing power, to organize the blockade of Napoleon and the merchant fleet for supply to Spain. The whole history of modern England, its acceptance of the factory system, its naval supremacy, its relation to the Continent, and its internal reforms—all rise from the kind of war Wellington made, and the kind he refused to make.

For the curious, the later "solutions" are: under Bismark and Moltke, increased training and use of equipment and material resources; under Hitler, "synchronized timing" (connected with air-power and the impossibility of large-scale surprise; also connected with "alertness and intelligence" in the individual soldier, a frightening development under a totalitarian military dictatorship); and finally, under Churchill, "the national sandbag defense", increasing "usable morale and initiative". Sandbag defense gets its name from the battle of London; but it refers to all sorts of defensive operations—a bullet is shot into sand and the dislodged grains of sand form themselves again so that the next bullet has the same depth of sand to go through—unless the bullets come so fast in "synchronized timing" or blitzkrieg that the sand hasn't time to close over the gap again. The defense "demands that every person in the nation be capable of sticking to his task even without detailed orders from others, regardless of the odds against him and though it may mean certain death. Every person—not merely the trained minority. This happened at Dunkirk...." At Dunkirk the grains of sand were hundreds of small yachts, motor boats, trawlers, coasting vessels, many of which were taken to the dreadful beach by civilians virtually without orders; some of them became ferry-boats, taking men off the shore to the transports which could not get close enough, going back and forth, without stop—the grains of sand reforming until an army was rescued.

These examples drive home the principle that a form or style of warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the nation at that time; the "psychology" of the nation may remain constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the methods of production have changed. If the nation has lost (or won) colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child