personal experience of the former. The longer the time
elapsed since hostilities were in progress, the more probable and
more general does this absence of experience become. The fighting
man--that is to say, the man set apart, paid, and trained so as
to be ready to fight when called upon--is of the same nature as
the rest of his species. This is a truism; but it is necessary to
insist upon it, because professional, and especially professorial,
strategists and tacticians almost invariably ignore it. That which
we have seen and know has not only more, but very much more,
influence upon the minds of nearly all of us than that of which
we have only heard, and, most likely, heard but imperfectly. The
result is that, when peace is interrupted and the fighting man--on
both sea and land--is confronted with the problems of practical
belligerency, he brings to his attempts at their solution an
intellectual equipment drawn, not from knowledge of real war,
but from the less trustworthy arsenal of the recollections of
his peace training.

When peace, especially a long peace, ends, the methods which it
has introduced are the first enemies which the organised defenders
of a country have to overcome. There is plenty of evidence to prove
that--except, of course, in unequal conflicts between highly
organised, civilised states and savage or semi-barbarian
tribes--success in war is directly proportionate to the extent
of the preliminary victory over the predominance of impressions
derived from the habits and exercises of an armed force during
peace. That the cogency of this evidence is not invariably recognised
is to be attributed to insufficient attention to history and to
disinclination to apply its lessons properly. A primary object
of the _Naval_Annual_--indeed, the chief reason for its
publication--being to assist in advancing the efficiency of the
British Navy, its pages are eminently the place for a review
of the historical examples of the often-recurring inability of
systems established in peace to stand the test of war. Hostilities
on land being more frequent, and much more frequently written
about, than those by sea, the history of the former as well as
of the latter must be examined. The two classes of warfare have
much in common. The principles of their strategy are identical;
and, as regards some of their main features, so are those of
the tactics followed in each. Consequently the history of land
warfare has its lessons f