Marshal Saxe asserted in his "Reveries" that down to his time there had been no formulation of principles, and that if any had been recognized as such in the minds of commanders of armies, they had not made it known.

[Footnote: Jomini, in the work already cited, quotes Marshal Saxe thus: "Que toutes les sciences avaient des principes, mais que la guerre seule n'en avait point encore; si ces principes ont existe dans la tete de quelques generaux, nulle part ils n'ont ete indiques ou developpes." The same idea has been put quite as trenchantly by one of the most recent writers of the English Army, Colonel J.F.Maurice, R.A.
Professor in the Farnborough Staff College.

In the able article on "War" in the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he says, "it must be emphatically asserted that there does not exist, and never except by pedants of whom the most careful students of war are more impatient than other soldiers, has there ever been supposed to exist, an 'art of war' which was something other than the methodic study of military history."] It was precisely in this department of military history "raisonnee" that frontier garrison life shut the young army officer out from the opportunities of profiting by his leisure.

The valuable books were all foreign publications in costly form with folio atlases, and were neither easy to procure nor easily carried about with the limited means and the rigid economy of transportation which marked army life in the far West.

That this was true even in the artillery is indicated by General Gibbon before the Committee on the Conduct of the War when questioned in reference to the relative amount of artillery used at Gettysburg as compared with great European battles; that distinguished officer having himself been in the artillery when the Civil War began.