Ardent du Picq had received no
encouragement from within or from without, and the reforms which he
never ceased to advocate were treated as the dreams of an eccentric
idealist. He died, unrecognized, without having lived to see carried
out one of the reforms which he had so persistently advocated. His
tongue was rough and his pen was dipped in acid; the military critic
who ridiculed the "buffooneries" of his generals and charged his
fellow-officers with trying to get through their day's work with as
little trouble to themselves as possible, was not likely to carry much
weight at the close of the Second Empire. But the scattered papers of
the forgotten Colonel Ardent du Picq were preserved, and ten years
after his death a portion of them was published. Every scrap which
could be found of the work of so fruitful a military thinker was
presently called for, and at the moment of the outbreak of the present
war the "Etudes sur le Combat" had become the text-book of every
punctilious young officer. It is still unknown how much of the
magnificent effort of 1914 was not due to the shade of Ardent du Picq.
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