JAPAN
seem to have contemplated anything like rapid, well-ordered changes of mobile, highly trained masses of men from one formation to another, or their quick transfer from point to point of a battle-field. The basis of their tactics is the Book of Changes. Here again is encountered the superstition that underlies nearly all Chinese and Japanese institutions,—the superstition that took captive even the great mind of Confucius. The male and the female principles; the sympathetic elements; the diagrams; cosmos growing out of chaos; chaos re-absorbing cosmos—on such phantasies did they found their tactical system. The result was a phalanx of complicated organisation, difficult to manœuvre and liable to be easily thrown into confusion. Yet, when Yamaga in the seventeenth century interpreted these ancient Chinese treatises, he detected in them suggestions for a very shrewd use of the principle of echelon, and applied it to devise formations which combined much of the frontal expansion of the line with the solidity of the column. More than that cannot be claimed for Japanese military genius. The Japanese samurai was the best fighting unit in the Orient; probably one of the best fighting units the world ever produced. It was, perhaps, because of that excellence that his captains remained mediocre tacticians.
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