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Updated: May 28, 2025
He would know that after recruits have been roughly instructed in the rudiments of a drill, the next best instructor is fighting. So it was in the thirty years' war; so in the American Revolution; so in the first French revolutionary wars. Strategians, martinets, lost the battles, or rather the campaigns, of Austerlitz, of Jena, etc.
The martinets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had so exaggerated the formalities of war that the relation of armies to the fighting-ground had been little studied and well-nigh forgotten; the use of the map and the compass, the study of reliefs and profiles in topography, produced in Bonaparte's hands results that seemed to duller minds nothing short of miraculous.
She knew that the fine ladies among whom, from the first, she had determined to place herself, were moral martinets with respect to any one not born among themselves.
The Blairs are not to be accused; I read the letter from F. Blair to his brother. It is the letter of a patriot, but not of an intriguer. Fremont establishes an absurd rule concerning the breach of military discipline, and shows by it his ignorance and narrow-mindedness. So Fremont, and other bungling martinets, assert that nobody has the right to criticise the actions of his commander.
There are plenty of people like this stickler for propriety and form, and if you want to find men blind as bats to the manifest tokens of a divine hand, and hard as millstones towards misery, and utterly incapable of glowing with enthusiasm or of recognising it, you will find them among ecclesiastical martinets, who are all for having 'things done decently and in order, and would rather that a hundred poor sufferers should continue bowed down than that one of their regulations should be broken in lifting them up.
Punishment is necessary but how many to whom it is intrusted forget that in giving it a moral effect upon society, care should be taken that it may operate beneficially upon the individual. Punishment has too often been connected with prejudice against Volunteers in the Army of the Potomac, controlled as it has been too much by martinets.
Ecclesiastical martinets, and men whose religion is mostly ceremony, are, of course, more 'moved with indignation' at any breach of ceremonial regulations than at holes made in graver laws. Nothing makes men more insensitive to the ring of real worship than being accustomed to the dull decorum of formal worship.
But I shall use my own judgement as to where I aim that gun whether at enemies in front of me, or at enemies behind me whether at my brothers, the working-men of Germany, or at my oppressors, the exploiters of Wall Street, their newspaper lackeys and military martinets!" The sentences of this speech came like the blows of a hammer, and they struck forth a clamour of applause from the audience.
On some occasions he acted in accordance with this declaration, and on a very remarkable one showed that he was justified in the dependence which he had on his own judgment; but whether his acting on it was defensible, must be left to the martinets to determine.
Even with as free a hand as the Lord Almighty, it would be hard to invent a better type of fighting man than the British Yeomanry; only, they have never been properly appreciated by the martinets who have ruled our roost, and chances have never been given to them to make the most of themselves as soldiers.
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