To inform, and, therefore to reconnoitre, this is the first and constant duty of the advanced guard.
Regulations are all very well for drill, but in the hour of danger they are no more use. You have to learn to think.
Victory is a thing of the will.
Don’t drown yourself in details. Look at the whole.
In whatever position you find yourself, determine first your objective.
A beaten general is disgraced forever.
The military mind always imagines that the next war will be on the same lines as the last. That has never been the case and never will be. One of the great factors on the next war will be aircraft obviously. The potentialities of aircraft attack on a large scale are almost incalculable.
In war there are none but particular cases; everything has there an individual nature; nothing ever repeats itself. In the first place, the data of a military problem are but seldom certain; they are never final. Everything is in a constant state of change and reshaping.
The truth is, no study is possible on the battle-field; one does there simply what one can in order to apply what one knows. Therefore, in order to do even a little, one has already to know a great deal and to know it well.
Every manoeuvre must be the development of a scheme; it must aim at a goal.
One is defeated only when one accepts defeat.
A battle won is a battle which we will not acknowledge to be lost.
No study is possible on the battlefield.
The unknown is the governing principle of war.
I am conscious of having served England as I served my own country.
One does simply what one can in order to apply what one knows .
Aviation is fine as a sport. But as an instrument of war, it is worthless.
The power to command has never meant the power to remain mysterious.
The laurels of victory are at the point of the enemy bayonets. They must be plucked there ; they must be carried by a hand-to-hand fight if one really means to conquer.
There is but one means to extenuate the effects of enemy fire: it is to develop a more violent fire oneself.