Quarterly Review Of Military Literature

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: Art. 2.?ARMY EDUCATION. 1. L'Armee Nouvelle. By Jean Jaures. Paris: Rouff, 1915 (first published 1910). 2. Report of Imperial Education Conference (June 11 and 12, 1919). London, 1919. ' The establishment of a closer co-operation between the army and the rest of the nation': such, in the words of Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, is the aim of the present system of army education. ' Une armee n'est forte qu'a la condition d'exprimer la vivante realite sociale'; in this phrase the great socialist orator and thinker, Jaures, summed up the object of his elaborate scheme of reform expounded in ' L'Armee Nouvelle.' Both phrases imply the same ideal. In his attempt to realise it, Jaures, true to the genius of his nation, elaborated a scheme, clear and logical in every detail, of army reform and army education; we, as characteristically, started an educational scheme hurriedly, to meet a pressing and limited need of the moment, and found, as it was developed, that it might secure the far greater object defined by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. On the other hand, it is significant that the inception of such a scheme should have followed, in our case, in circumstances similar to those in which Jaures wrote in 1910; that is, at a time when the whole manhood of the nation was in the army, and most Englishmen had a chance, such as they never had before, of realising what are the conditions of military service. No one, probably, would deny that before the war the relations between the army and the rest of the community were not so close as they should have been. The army formed a class apart, with interests of its own. The civilian took little account of the soldier's peacetime routine, while the soldier was carefully shielded from the pre-occupations of his fellow-citizen...