Q1.
(a) The world. Is there any wonder that our eyes sometimes stray wistfully to the bookshelves and away from a dull visitor, or that we shirk a tiresome duty for an exciting book?
(b) Books or people? Reading or conversation or, nowadays, listening in to the radio? Which is the better way to gain knowledge or to spend your leisure? Some fortunate people seem always to find time for both and to enjoy both almost equally. My great friend, Arthur Wauchope, a fine soldier, a most able administrator and a very gifted personality, was a constant reader, yet was always ready to lay aside a book for talk and was a most interesting and interested talker.
(c) The advantages of reading over talk are of course that we can select the book that suits our mood, can go at our own pace, skip, or turn back, whereas we cannot turn over two pages of a tedious companion or close him, or her, with a bang. But reading lacks the human touch, the salt of life, and is, therefore, a dangerous substitute for thought or action. Bacon in one of his essays says that reading maketh a full man; conference (that is talking) a ready man; and writing an exact man. One would like to be full of knowledge, ready in speech, and exact by training. But full of what? What sort of reading has impressed itself on my memory, and what books have found a permanent place on my bookshelves?
(d) To begin with my profession, soldiering. I do not believe that soldiering, a practical business, in which human nature is the main element, can be learnt from text-books, and more than can boxing or cricket or golf. But for those who have grasped the principles of war and have understood that the human factor is the most important element in it, there is military reading that is fascinating and valuable.
(e) 'Read and re-read the campaigns of the great commanders,' said Napoleon. I would venture to put it differently and would say that the lives and characters of the great commanders are what students of war should examine, since their campaigns are only incidents in them; and that the behaviour of leaders and of their men in the field is the subject for study. Take Napoleon's first campaign of 1796. The text-book will tell you that he won by manoeuvre on interior lines or by the principle of concentration of force or some similar conjuration. One learns nothing, I hold, by such dogma.
