Yes, but these men kept thinking, thinking.
Nobody heard _them_ saying that all great wars had been fought.
Perhaps they did not know whether all wars had been fought or not; but
they knew this: That if any future wars were to be fought, those wars
would be bigger than any conflict that had gone before, and that their
armies would have to be handled with greater precision, and their
tactics would have to be more daring than even those of Napoleon, or
Hannibal, or Caesar.
Very well, the Franco-Prussian War did come. The Russo-Japanese War
did come. And when the time for these dread duels between peoples
arrived, those men were in the saddle. Battles whose red desperation
have made the world's historic combats look small, have within a year
taught all men that the art of war requires as much original thinking
as it did when the Corsican overwhelmed the muddled military minds of
Europe, weakened and palsied by the belief that nothing more was to be
learned in warfare.
Manchuria's awful lesson teaches you, young man, that the profession
of arms, dreadful as it is honorable, holds out to you all the
possibilities by which every great captain of history made his name
immortal.
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