idential files.

Yet this work is basic. Perhaps it is for that reason, that it is
obscure and dull; basic work is apt to be so. The spectacular success
of an individual in any walk of life is often but the crowning of
the unrecognized, and often utterly unknown work--of other men.

Strategy is not a science only; it is an art as well; and although
the art cannot be practised in its perfection until after the science
is well comprehended, yet the art of strategy was born before the
science was. This is true of all those departments of man's activity
that are divided into sciences and arts, such as music, surgery,
government, navigation, gunnery, painting, sculpture, and the rest;
because the fundamental facts--say of music--cannot even attract
attention until some music has been produced by the art of some
musician, crude though that art may be; and the art cannot advance
very far until scientific methods have been applied, and the principles
that govern the production of good music have been found. The unskilled
navigators of the distant past pushed their frail craft only short
distances from the land, guided by art and not by science; for no
science of navigation then existed. But the knowledge gradually gained,
passing first from adept to pupil by word of mouth, and afterward
recorded on the written and then the printed page, resulted first
in the realization of the fact that various apparently unrelated
phenomena were based on the same underlying principles; and resulted
later in the perception, and still later in the definite expression,
of those underlying principles. Using these principles, the navigator
expanded the limits of his art. Soon we see Columbus, superbly bold,
crossing the unknown ocean; and Magellan piercing the southern
tip of the American continent by the straits that now bear his
name.

But of all the arts and sciences, the art and science that are
the oldest and the most important; that have caused the greatest
expenditure of labor, blood, and money; that have been the immediate
instruments of more changes and greater changes in the history of
the world than any other, are the art and the science of strategy.

Until the time of Moltke the art of strategy, like most arts, was
more in evidence than the science. In fact, science of any kind is
a comparatively recent product, owing largely to the more exact
operations of the mind brought about by the birth of the science of
measurement, and the