We wish we had space to do justice to the
merits of Sir Douglas Haig's final despatch, which was published in the papers of Friday week. We can recall no despatch quite like it, for while Sir Douglas Haig describes the culminating operations of the war, he also gives us an engrossing disquisition on the immutability of the principles of war. He conceives the long war against Germany as reproducing on a vast scale all the familiar phases of a single battle. Thus the reserves at Waterloo were intro- duced and disposed of within a few minutes. The corresponding phase in the war against Germany occupied months. Napoleon, of course, said the same thing about the changelessness of war. In his conversations at St. Helena, as reported by Gourgeud, he remarked : I have fought sixty battles, and I assure you that I learned nothing in all of them which I did not know-in the first. Look at Caesar; he fought his first battle just as he fought his last."
Previous page
