in order to play strategy well enough to compete
successfully with professional strategists. The game of chess looks
easy to a beginner; in fact, the kind of game that he thinks chess
to be is easy. But after he has learned the moves, he finds the
intricacies of the game developing more rapidly than he can master
them, and discovers that chess is a game which some men spend their
lifetime studying. The full realization of this fact, however, does
not come to him until after defeats by better players have forced
into his consciousness the almost infinite number of combinations
possible, the difficulty of deciding on the correct move at any
juncture, and the consequences that follow after wrong moves.

So with strategy. The ease and certainty with which orders can be
transmitted and received, the precision with which large forces
can be quickly despatched from place to place, and the tremendous
power exertable by those forces, tend to blind the mind to the
fact that transferring any force to any place is merely making a
"move," and that the other player can make moves, too. If a man
were never to be pitted in strategy against another player, either
in games or in actual war, the "infinite variety" of strategy would
never be disclosed to his intelligence; and after learning how
to make the moves, he might feel willing to tackle any one.
Illustrations of this tendency by people of great self-confidence
are numerous in history, and have not been missing even in the
present war, though none have been reported in this country as
occurring on the Teuton side. There has always been a tendency
on the part of a ruling class to seize opportunities for military
glory, and the ambition has often been disproportioned to the
accompanying ability and knowledge--sometimes on the part of a
King, prince, or man of high nobility, sometimes on the part of
a minister, sometimes on the part of an army or navy man, who has
been indebted to political or social influence for his place. But
within the past fifty years, especially since the establishment
of the General Staff in Prussia and the studies of Von Moltke,
the overshadowing importance of strategy has been understood, the
necessity of comprehending its principles and practising its technic
has been appreciated, and attempts to practise strategy by persons
inexpert in strategy have been deprecated.

The game of strategy, while resembling in many ways the game of
chess, differs from it, o