An Army is still a crowd, though a highly organized one. It is governed by the same laws, and under the stress of war is ever tending to revert to its crowd form. Our object in peace is so to train it that the reversion will become very slow.

The governments of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which....pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I.

It is absolutely true in war, were other things equal, that numbers, whether men, shells, bombs, etc., would be supreme. Yet it is also absolutely true that other things are never equal and can never be equal.

The strongest army in the world [the French] facing no more than twenty-six [German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!

Discipline is no longer literal obedience but intelligent obedience, for discipline aims at obedience coupled with activity of will. Once discipline weakens and vanishes, as it does towards the latter stages of the fire fight, and the crowd instinct possesses the soldier, then will he, if training has formed those necessary mental reflexes, surrender himself to the will of his leader; this is where leadership supplants discipline without destroying it.

To me our bombing policy appears to be suicidal. Not because it does not do vast damage to our enemy, it does; but because, simultaneously, it does vast damage to our peace aim, unless that aim is mutual economic and social annihilation.

In the World War [WW1] nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading.