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Updated: June 24, 2025
In asking for a doctrine in combat and in seeking to base it on the moral element, Ardant du Picq was ahead of his generation. He has had a very great influence. But, the doctrine is not yet established. How to approach the adversary? How to pass from the defensive to the offensive? How to regulate the shock? How to give orders that can be executed? How to transmit them surely?
They are radically opposed to those which enchant our parliamentarians or military politicians, which are based on a fatal favoritism and which precipitate wars. Ardant du Picq is not alone a superior doctrinaire. He will be consulted with profit in practical warlike organization. No one has better depicted the character of modern armies.
Coming from the superior mind of a leader who inspires faith it imposes obedience by its very strength. Colonel Ardant du Picq was a military writer only, with a style of his own. He has the Latin brevity and concentration. He retains his thought, assembles it and always puts it out in a compact phrase like a cartridge.
They serve as examples and rallying points for other generations, more clear-sighted and less degenerate. On reading over the extraordinary work of Ardant du Picq, that brilliant star in the eclipse of our military faculties, I think of the fatal shot that carried him off before full use had been found for him, and I am struck by melancholy. Our fall appears more poignant.
"As for the rest, whether it please you to aid or not, General, kindly accept the assurance of most respectful devotion from your obedient servant." The reading of this unique document is sufficient to explain the glory that Ardant du Picq deserved.
France submits sometimes to the yoke of subtle dialecticians who preach total disarmament, who spread insanely disastrous doctrine of capitulation, glorify disgrace and humiliation, and stupidly drive us on to suicide. The manly counsels of Ardant du Picq are admirable lessons for a nation awakening.
Extract from the correspondence of Colonel Ardant du Picq. A letter sent from Huy, February 9, 1869, by Captain de V , a company officer in the attack division. "My company, with the 3rd, commanded by Captain D was designated to cover the battalion. "At eight or nine hundred meters from the Alma, we saw a sort of wall, crowned with white, whose use we could not understand.
In an army in which most of the seniors disdained the future and neglected their responsibilities, rested satisfied on the laurels of former campaigns and relied on superannuated theories and the exercises of a poor parade, scorned foreign organizations and believed in an acquired and constant superiority that dispenses with all work, and did not suspect even the radical transformations which the development of rifles and rapid-fire artillery entail; Ardant du Picq worked for the common good.
After the abandonment of the law of 1872, and the repeal of the law of 1889, and before the introduction of numerous and disquieting reforms in recruitment and consequently, in the education of our regiments, would it not be opportune to study Ardant du Picq and look for the secret of force in his ideas rather than in the deceptive illusions of military automatism and materialism?
"They are sending one of their creatures to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, after you have had all the trouble of making it. Breveted! That's a great way. The theories of Ardant du Picq or else nothing about here." "I don't altogether agree with you," said the Major.
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