ction the machinery already in existence, to
encourage invention, to ponder the past with a practical application to
the present, to court fatigue, to scorn pleasure, to concentrate the
energies on the work in hand, to cultivate quickness of eye and calmness
of nerve in the midst of danger, to accelerate movements, to economise
blood even at the expense of time, to strive after ubiquity and
omniscience in the details of person and place, these were the
characteristics of Maurice, and they have been the prominent traits of
all commanders who have stamped themselves upon their age. Although his
method of war-making differed as far as possible from that quality in
common, of the Bearnese, yet the two had one personal insensibility to
fear. But in the case of Henry, to confront danger for its own sake was
in itself a pleasure, while the calmer spirit of Maurice did not so much
seek the joys of the combat as refuse to desist from scientific
combinations in the interests of his personal safety. Very frequently, in
the course of his early campaigns, the prince was formally and urgently
requested by the States-General not to expose his life so recklessly, and
before he had passed his twenty-fifth year he had received wounds which,
but for fortunate circumstances, would have proved mortal, because he was
unwilling to leave special operations on which much was depending to
other eyes than his own. The details of his campaigns are, of necessity,
the less interesting to a general reader from their very completeness.
Desultory or semi-civilised warfare, where the play of the human passions
is distinctly visible, where individual man, whether in buff jerkin or
Milan coat of proof, meets his fellow man in close mortal combat, where
men starve by thousands or are massacred by town-fulls, where hamlets or
villages blaze throughout whole districts or are sunk beneath the
ocean--scenes of rage, hatred, vengeance, self-sacrifice, patriotism,
where all the virtues and vices of which humanity is capable stride to
and fro in their most violent colours and most colossal shape where man
in a moment rises almost to divinity, or sinks beneath the beasts of the
field--such tragical records of which the sanguinary story of mankind is
full--and no portion of them more so than the Netherland chronicles
appeal more vividly to the imagination than the neatest solution of
mathematical problems. Yet, if it be the legitimate end of military
science to accom