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CHAP. VIII.
How Souldiers are to be encouraged to fight; and how they are to be cooled and asswaged when their courage is too high.
IT many times happens that your Souldiers are impatient to be fighting, but if you do not find it convenient in respect of the number of your Army, the disadvan∣tage of the place, or some other consideration, you would do well to turn them from that inclination. It happens again that necessity or occasion constrains you to fight when your Souldiers are diffident or adverse: in one case it is necessary that you affright them, in the other that you excite them. In the first case, when remonstrances and exhortations will do not good, the best way is to suffer some of them to be cut off by the enemy, that those who have fought, and those who have not, may believe you another time. What Fabius Maximus did by accident, may be done on purpose, and by art. You know the Army of Fabius was very fierce to be fighting with Hanibal, and his Master of the Horse was of the same mind with the Army: Fabius was of another opinion, and thought it better to protract; and this diversity of opinions occasioned the dividing of the Army: Fabius kept his division in his trenches, the Master of the Horse went out, fought, was worsted, and had certainly been cut off, had not Fabius relieved him; by which example the Master of the Horse, and the whole Army were convinced that their wisest way was to have obeyed the orders of Fabius. As to the other point of animating your Souldiers, and raising their courages to a pitch, it is good to incense them by possessing them of the contumacy and insolence of the enemy: by pretending intelligence among them, and that you have cor∣rupted a considerable party; by posting your Army so near them, that they may see one another, and skirmish with them slightly every day, (for things which are done daily, we easily despise) by counterfeiting your self angry, and in a solemn and grave oration repre∣hending and upbraiding their backwardness, and telling them, that if they leave you, you will charge the enemy alone. But to make your Souldiers bold and couragious, you are by no means to permit any of them to send any thing to their own houses (or to deposit it any where else) till the war be done, that they may know that though in running home they may save their lives, yet it must be with the loss of their prize; the love of which ren∣ders people commonly as valiant as the love of their lives.
You say that Souldiers may be encouraged, and disposed to fight, by a speech or oration: do you intend it should be delivered to the whole Army, or only to the Officers?