Emulating Pershing at Devens.

The new school for general officers, which was begun at Camp Devens yesterday, should do more to build up coordination among all the arms of the service than any other effort yet undertaken in the cantonments on this side of the water. Its story, however, has not all been told when this point has been set down to its credit. Another great advantage of the new school is the recognition it gives to the fact that no man can successfully be both teacher and pupil at the same time. In all his work as chief of the American Expeditionary Force, General Pershing has admitted this principle. Most of the advanced training arranged for our officers in France is conducted in special schools and officers attending them are detached from all concerns except the business of study.

In the American camps, on the other hand, in so far as we have allowed officers any additional instruction after they have completed their first "Plattsburg" training and received their commissions, it has been given them chiefly in conjunction with the manifold duties of their regular commands. They have remained responsible for carrying out the drill and instruction of the men in their companies. The result has been that advanced courses under the British and French officers could not be pursued with the singleness of purpose, the freshness of mental and physical effort, necessary to the task. The Americans were already too absorbed with their own work as teachers to be qualified also as good pupils. Moreover, the advanced schools, under these conditions, could not be organized with the completeness and extent of curriculum essential to the development of anything like full co-ordination.

All these shortcomings have been condoned by the War Department on the theory that there would be time enough in France to give our officers the training they require. It was upon this understanding that last year's Government school for commissioned officers, conducted at Harvard at the close of the R. O. T. C. session, and by all odds the best of its kind ever held in this country, was abandoned after only one lot of 550 of our officers, old and young, had received instruction in it. Now we know that there is no mind on earth capable of predicting how much time may be available for completing the training of units after they arrive in France. We see that the one right thing to do on this side of the Atlantic is what General Pershing is doing behind the fighting lines--to wit, making the best possible use of every possible moment. One thing is certain, no officer can ever be too well trained. That he should not be too little trained, the school now opened at Devens gives promising new assurance. --Boston Transcript.