Military Review English Edition July-August 2015 | Page 131

On the Need for Thinking Soldiers

Lt. Gen. Sir William Butler

Maj. Gen. Sir Charles George Gordon

“In England there has long been an idea prevalent in
the minds of many persons that the soldier should be
a species of man distinct from the rest of the community. He should be purely and simply a soldier, ready to
knock down upon word of command being duly given
for that purpose, but knowing nothing of the business
of building up …. It is needless to say that Charles
Gordon held a totally different view of the soldier’s
proper sphere of action, and with him the building part
of the soldier’s profession was far more important than
the breaking part. The surgeon who could only cut off a
leg or amputate an arm, but who knew nothing of binding up the wound or stopping an open artery, could not
be of much account in any estimate of men. Gordon
understood the fact that nations as well as individuals

have pulses, that the leader who would lead to any
definite end must know how to count these pulsations,
and, in addition to his skill as a sword-cutter, must be
able to do a good deal of the binding up of wounds, even
though he had himself caused them. To say this is, of
course, only to say that Gordon was great, in a sense
greater than any merit of action in arms could aspire to.
The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of
demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its
thinking by cowards.”
Extract: Charles George Gordon by Colonel (later
General) Sir William F. Butler, published by MacMillan
and Co. in 1889, p. 85