Paths of Glory by Irvin S. Cobb — Read

Let me say at the outset of this chapter that I do not set up as one / professing to have any knowledge whatsoever of so-called military / science. The more I have seen of the carrying-on of the actual business / of war, the less able do I seem to be to understand the meanings of the / business. For me strategy remains a closed book. Even the simplest / primary lessons of it, the A B C's of it, continue to impress me as / being stupid, but none the less unplumbable mysteries.

The physical aspects of campaigning I can in a way grasp. At least I / flatter myself that I can. A man would have to be deaf and dumb and / blind not to grasp them, did they reveal themselves before him as they / have revealed themselves before me. Indeed, if he preserved only the / faculty of scent unimpaired he might still be able to comprehend the / thing, since, as I have said before, war in its commoner phases is not / so much a sight as a great bad smell. As for the rudiments of the / system which dictates the movements of troops in large masses or in / small, which sacrifices thousands of men to take a town or hold a river / when that town and that river, physically considered, appear to be of no / consequence whatsoever, those elements I have not been able to sense, / even though I studied the matter most diligently. So after sundry / months of first-hand observation in one of the theaters of hostilities, / I tell myself that the trade of fighting is a trade to be learned by / slow and laborious degrees, and even then may be learned with / thoroughness only by one who has a natural aptitude for it. Either / that, or else I am most extraordinarily thick-headed, for I own that I / am still as complete a greenhorn now as I was at the beginning.