CHAPTER XII
STAFF WORK AND BATTLE PREPARATION
The foundations of the success or non-success of a battle rest on its organisation, that is, on the preparations made for it. This is the duty of the General and Administrative Staffs of an Army or Formation and usually entails an immense amount of careful work. The fact that success depends as much, if not more, on organisation (brain power) as on valour (nerve power) is not generally recognised, and many an officer and man in the firing line is, through ignorance of the causes and effects which are operating behind, only too prone to forget what the staff is doing, and, never more so, what the staff has done than after a really great victory has been gained.
The more scientific weapons become the more will good staff work decide whether their use is going to lead to victory or defeat. This was very early realised in the Tank Corps, and every endeavour was made by its commander and his subordinate leaders to select only the most capable officers for their respective staffs; this resulted in ability more often than seniority deciding the filling of an appointment.
The work of the Staff of the Tank Corps was often considerably complicated by the fact that, the tank being a novel weapon of war, it was little understood, not only by the other arms, but by many members of the Tank Corps itself. This resulted in a great deal of educational work being required before many measures, very obvious to the Staff itself, were accepted by others. In the early days of the Corps the tank was generally placed by the other arms under one of two categories--a miracle or a joke, and this did not tend to facilitate or expedite preparations.
The main duty of the General Staff is to foresee by thinking ahead, of the Administrative Staff to prepare, of the Commander to decide, and of his troops to act. These four links go to build up a battle, and if any one of them is defective, the whole chain is weak. On the power of thinking ahead, that is, foreseeing conditions and events, will depend all preparations. Decisions cannot with safety be simply based on former experiences, codified and printed rules and regulations; if this were possible every intelligent subaltern with a good memory or a big pocket could become a Napoleon[23] in six weeks. Decisions must be based on weapons and men moved in accordance with the principles of war as governed by conditions existing and possible. Possible conditions cannot be guessed at; if they could the planchet board and not the baton would be the emblem of a field-marshal’s worth. Possible conditions can only be guarded against or converted into allies by being prepared to meet all eventualities, and these preparations in a formation such as the Tank Corps were at first prodigious. Little by little, however, the knack of mechanical warfare was cultivated, and then what had at first appeared a mountain eventually turned out to be a molehill--a good sprinkling of molehills, and not a few mountains, however, remained over even to the last.
In the training schemes carried out before the battle of Arras, as mentioned in