Manœuvres form an expensive portion of the conscript's training, and it will be understood, when it is remembered that under ordinary peace conditions France maintains twenty military stations, each forming the skeleton of an army corps, that the annual cost to the state runs into a considerable fraction of the total military expenditure, this including the cost of food for men, forage for horses, the running of transports and stores, and all the expenses incidental to the maintenance of troops in the field. One item alone, the cost of shells fired by artillery during their annual practice, represent a large expenditure, for each shell is in itself a complicated piece of machinery, which must be perfectly accurate in all its parts, and is a costly thing to produce.

Not that the soldier on manœuvres ever counts cost; the majority of the troops do not even think of such a thing. They are out roughing it, a business which gratifies the instincts of most healthy minded and bodied men, and one which is conducive to health and high spirits. Your conscript on manœuvres is a different being from the one who came to the colours in the previous October. He has acquired a self-confidence and self-reliance of which he was innocent at the beginning of his training; he came as a boy, but now there are about him the signs of a man, and the first camp more than anything else gives him a realisation of the value of military training from a man's own point of view, and quite apart from its value to the state. By the time the season of manœuvres is over he is a second-year man, and has begun to feel his feet.

If one takes a map of France and picks out the twenty stations of the various army corps scattered throughout the country, and then if one realises the numbers of men actually serving that these stations represent, one will see that it is quite impossible that all the army corps of the country should make a point of undergoing their manœuvres as one united body. The disturbance inflicted from a civilian point of view on the area chosen would be enormous, and the result of no more value as regards the training of officers and men than when two or three army corps conduct their mimic warfare together. Certainly more than one army corps should be engaged in an annual set of manœuvres. For instance, if one took Lyons as the station concerned, and assumed that the army corps stationed at Lyons conducted its manœuvres year after year independently of those army corps which have their head-quarters at other centres, it would be easily understood that the army corps with head-quarters at Lyons would, to a certain extent, get into a rule-of-thumb way of working, and would fail to keep itself abreast of the various discoveries that are constantly being made by all sorts and conditions of commanders in the art of war. It is essential that units should as far as possible be able to interchange ideas, and learn new ways from each other, for war is a business in which, given forces of equal strength, the most intelligently controlled army wins.

The manœuvre areas of France are many. There are stretches of hill country like the district of the Vosges; forest stretches like the Ardennes in which the French Army has recently conducted some of its stiffest fights; great open plains like that which lies about Châlons, or like the Breton Landes; and river basins of diversified country, giving reaches of hill, valley and woodland, and most useful of all from a military educational point of view, since they afford training in practically all branches of the soldier's work.

In average manœuvres, two forces, designated respectively as a blue and a red force, or in some way distinguished from each other by marks which enable men to tell "friend" from "enemy," are set to face each other in a certain limited area. Each force is expected to do its best to render the other ineffective as a fighting force, and the conditions are made to resemble those of real warfare as nearly as possible. It must be said, however, that up to the present, no nation in its military manœuvres has ever allowed sufficiently for casualties; as an instance may be cited the case of a regiment which, on a certain set of manœuvres in France, was surrounded and entirely put out of action early in the course of the operations. Had the business been real, the men of that particular regiment would all have been either dead or prisoners, but they were allowed to continue to count in the force to which they belonged, and the commander of the opposing force simply scored up so much credit for having achieved a brilliant military operation. Of course, from the point of view of training officers and men, for which manœuvres are specially designed, it was quite right that the officers and men of this unit should take part in the operations up to the last day, but, since men do not resurrect in this fashion after a real battle, it may be said, viewing the matter disinterestedly, that there was no further tactical value in the scheme carried out. The opposing forces were so constituted for the operation as to be of about equal strength, and the presence or absence of the regiment referred to would have been quite sufficient to turn the scale one way or the other—and yet they were allowed to take part after having been theoretically wiped out of existence! This anomalous method of procedure is not peculiar to the French Army, however, but is practically common to the armies of all nations.

The nature of the work which the conscript has to perform on manœuvres is purely a matter of luck. For instance, the force in which one is serving may be compelled, in order to carry out the scheme of its commander, to execute a wheeling or turning movement to either flank, and, supposing a wheel to the right flank is required, then the men on the right flank have very little marching to do, and very little work, since their part in the scheme is to wait for the wheeling flank to come round. An amusing old scamp whose service began when the five years' law was still in force, and who served in a French infantry battalion up to a short time ago, used to allege that he was once right-hand man of an army corps which wheeled in this fashion with the right flank for a pivot. "I stood for three weeks," he alleged, "on that flank, waiting for the outer flank to come round, and looking up the line to see that the men kept their dressing." The "dressing," it should be explained, is a term used in both the French and British Army for the keeping of line by the men.

But, speaking seriously, these wheeling movements occur frequently during a term of manœuvres; when the business is over, and the men of the various units come to compare notes, they are often puzzled at the enormous amount of work and marching imposed on one unit, while another had practically nothing to do, and stayed very nearly in the same place throughout the whole time. For, though the part that his own regiment has to play in a scheme is usually explained to the conscript, the strategical nature of the scheme as a whole is generally beyond his comprehension. This is not to be wondered at, since a strategical scheme is planned out by the best brains of the army corps—at least, the staff officers are supposed to possess the best brains, and are given their posts mainly on account of greater fitness for the planning of military operations.

Manœuvres as a whole approximate as nearly as is possible, in view of the difference in circumstances, to active service, but "nearly as possible" is not "quite," and the lessons learned on manœuvres, valuable though they are, cannot be unreservedly applied to active service. Reference has already been made to the way in which the soldier enjoys his period of manœuvres, but no man enjoys active service in a similar fashion, and moral, one of the greatest deciding factors in war, is entirely absent from the mimic warfare in which armies engage in time of peace. At the same time the lessons learned from manœuvres are as valuable as they are varied. Commanding officers learn the amount of strain which they can impose on their men; the conditions under which transport can and must be brought up for the use of the troops can be studied with almost as much accuracy as in warfare; the cavalry commander learns the value, from a war point of view, of his men as scouts and on detached duties, while the artillery officer finds out, as he never could without manœuvre experience, the possibilities of gun transport, and the business of ranging positions with a view to rendering them untenable by shellfire. Where the manœuvre period fails as regards war lies mainly in the absence of disadvantages. As already remarked, the conditions under which transport can be brought up for the use of troops can be studied, but sometimes in war transport goes wrong, or gets captured, and an army has to do its best to keep the field until supplementary supplies can be obtained; manœuvres never impose this form of disability on the troops. The cavalry commander is unable to ascertain what his men would do when actually under fire, and though artillery officers learn to range a position, they are unable to judge what the troops occupying that position will be like after shelling has been carried out. Manœuvres teach up to a point, but from that point the art of war can be learned only from the grim business itself, and, since no two bodies of troops a............