It is a very great thing for an
officer to be loved by his men. . . .

Knowledge! The capability of doing yourself anything you call on those
under you to do; of showing them when they are right and when they are
wrong; of making them trust your ability. It is a very great thing for
an officer to be trusted by his men.

Intensity of purpose! The driving force that gives enthusiasm, that
causes the hand on the plough to remain there until the job is done;
the quality that abhors vacillation, that prevents a man taking a thing
up one moment with red-hot eagerness and dropping it the next because
he's tired of it. The men despise vacillation and chopping and
changing. Being "messed about," they call it; only the word is not
messed. And it is a terrible thing for an officer to be despised by
his men. . . .

From good leadership there springs good discipline, that other word so
little understood by those who have not met it in the flesh. Not,
believe me, the rigorous punishment for breaking certain arbitrary
rules, enforced by an autocrat on men placed temporarily under him by a
whim of fate; far from it. Discipline is merely the doctrine which
teaches of the subordination of self for the whole; it teaches the
doctrine of playing the game; it teaches the all-important fact that
the fear of being found out and punished should _not be_ the chief
force in a man's life, but rather that the realisation of his
responsibility should be the guiding factor.

Such is the ideal aimed at in a good regiment. That there are some who
miss that aim none but a fool would deny; the same may be said of most
professions, even, I suppose, of bishops. That there are some officers
who go the wrong way to work, who nag and bully and generally turn
themselves into something even worse than nature intended is an
undoubted fact. That there are some men who are wasters; who were born
wasters and will die as such is also quite true. But I maintain that
the training, the ideals, the traditions, the morale of the good
British regiment does produce, and has produced, a growth of character
and a condition of mind in the men who belong to it which was largely
conspicuous by its absence in civil life.

Why, I do not profess to say. Why the great thinkers and the
vaporising burblers between them should not have hit on some method of
training character which would have produced equally good results to
those produced by what they are still pl