Topic: Officers
It was not enough to read these works, the author said; the officer should make extracts and comments.
Officers and Study (1850s)
Gallant Gentlemen; a portrait of the British Officer 1600-1956, E.S. Turner, 1956
Early in the 1850s an anonymous military tutor wrote a book, The Pattern Military Officer, designed to help officer candidates to pass their entrance examination. Among the requirements of the examiners, he said, was that the candidate should be able to translate any passage in Livy's History of Rome (Books 21-25 inclusive), and any portion of the Aeneid (Books 1 to 3), with parsing and prosody. Non-classical scholars were to translate a given passage in French or German. All candidates had to know the names of the European capitals, and be able to trace in the presence of the examiners a front fortification according to Vauban's First System, and the profile of a rampart and a parapet.
This military tutor recommended an officer to equip himself with:—
- Cæsar's Commentaries,
- Plutarch's Lives,
- Alison's Life of the Duke of Wellington,
- the Histories of:—
- Yates's Elementary Treatises in Tactics and Strategy,
- Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula (six volumes),
- Wellington's Dispatches (abridged),
- Saxe's Reveries,
- Napoleon's Maxims,
- Lallemand's Traite' des Operations Secondaires de la Guerre,
[and] various works on military fortification and strategy and a technological dictionary.
It was not enough to read these works, the author said; the officer should make extracts and comments.
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