Staff (object)

“ THE CHIEF OF THE GENERAL STAFF
In the best work the man is more than the school. An ordinary man gives out no more than has been put into him. All his performances can be explained by his antecedents. But the best workers contribute from themselves an element which no analysis can adequately explain. A Newton or a Columbus, a Stanley or a Whitworth, has some unseen spring of force and insight.
A man of this stamp is required at the head of an army, and above all at the head of the organization entrusted with the design of operations. ”

“ The other path, study of the languages, is a rugged and tortuous one, still you have only to plod steadily along its length, and, sooner or later, you must come to a 'staff appointment.' Bien entendu, I suppose you to be destitute of or deficient in Interest whose magic influence sets you down at once a heaven-born Staff Officer, at the goal which others must toil to reach. ”

“ In those firms which manufacture a large range of machinery, the drawing-office staff is separated into departments, each under its own chief, and there is seldom any transference of men from one to another. ”

“ Numbers of zealous, meritorious, and valuable officers have made the duties of the general staff objects of special study; have embraced the staff as a branch of the profession in which under existing laws they are entitled to promotion for merit and long service, just as the line officers have a right to promotion in their branch. ”

“ It thus appears that the institution of a general staff as one of the organs of the management of an army is based upon a true analysis applying equally to all civilized armies, and to all ordered warfare. ”

“ In this way a regular staff could be set to work, under competent direction, and could be kept steadily at work until its performances became so generally known and so useful as to enable it to stand alone and be self-supporting. ”

“ And, the principle once recognized that staff organization is the only road to infallibility, the institution of an additional staff for the study of so vital a matter must inevitably have followed. The existence of one competent, impartial, and impersonal expert body would automatically have resulted in the creation of another. ”

“ And the staff of servants is separated into many divisions: some labour for their gluttony, carvers and seasoners, and the compounders and makers of sweetmeats, and honey-cakes, and custards; others are occupied with their too numerous clothes; others guard the gold, like griffins; others keep the silver, and wipe the cups, and make ready what is needed to furnish the festive table; others rub down the horses; and a crowd of cup-bearers exert themselves in their service, and herds of beautiful boys, like cattle, from whom they milk away their beauty. ”

“ They put on solemn faces and do not talk with one another, but murmur prayers, walking with their bodies bent, and leaning on a staff—frequently, too, without a staff. How they have longed to come here! ”

“ I have assumed that you prefer to work in this way because I have noted the fact that nine watchmakers out of every ten start with, and first finish up, the lower portion of the staff. Where this method of working originated I do not know, but it always has the appearance to me of "placing the cart before the horse." I do not pretend to say that a true staff cannot be made in this way, but it certainly is not the most convenient nor advisable. We all know that the heaviest part of the staff is from the roller seat to the end of the top pivot. ”

“ Staffs or Staves, stāvz) : a body of skilled officers whose duty it is, under orders from the commanding officers of various grades, to arrange the movements and supply of the various bodies which go to make up an army: a similar body of persons in any undertaking, acting under a manager or chief (the last two meanings have pl. Staffs, stafs) .—ns. Staff′-captain, the senior grade in the navigating branch in the British navy; Staff′-coll′ege, a college where military officers are trained in the higher branches of professional knowledge, and prepared for holding staff-appointments ”

“ To this scientific staff of six highly trained individuals there should be added a business manager, a clerical force of three individuals, a skilled mechanician, a carpenter, and at least four laborers. ”

“ The organization of such a department depends entirely upon the number of applicants and employees with which it must deal and the character of the work to be done. Suppose, for example, we have a factory with two thousand employees, seventy-five per cent of them skilled, fifteen per cent of them unskilled, and ten per cent office employees. The work of such a department could be very well carried on by one employment supervisor, one assistant supervisor, one clerk and record-keeper, and part of the time of one stenographer. The employment supervisor is a staff officer. ”

“ The importance to the Army of a competent Staff can be judged from the above account of their duties. The Staff forms the nervous system of the Command. The better trained the Staff, the more free will the General be to concentrate his attention on the situation, and his Subordinate Commanders to carry out his plans with co-operating intelligence. Good Staff Officers, it has been well said, are eyes, ears, and hands to their Chief. ”

“ It has already been shown how the great general staff is the organ by which during peace its chief collects and sifts the information upon which he bases his plan for the opening of a campaign, and how, when the operations have begun, the general staff, through its several ramifications, keeps him supplied with the data concerning his own army and that of the enemy which he requires from time to time in order to shape his further decisions. ”

“ Staff′-corps, a body of intelligent officers and men who performed engineering and siege duties, made reconnaissances, &c. during the wars of Wellington; (Indian) a body of British officers serving on the permanent Indian establishment, appointed from it to do duty with native regiments, &c.; Staff′-dū′ty, the occupation of an officer who serves on a staff, having been detached from his regiment; Staff′-notā′tion, musical notation in which a staff is used, as opposed to the tonic-solfa system; Staff′-sur′geon, a navy surgeon of senior grade ”

“ Two separate organizations existed with parallel functions--the 'general' more occupied in giving direction to his troops than in providing for their material wants, which he regarded as the special province of the staff, and the 'intendant' (staff) often working at random, taking on his shoulders a crushing burden of functions and duties, exhausting himself with useless efforts, and aiming to accomplish an insufficient service, to the disappointment of everybody. ”

“ The staff of authority, which we have in so many forms, as sceptre, crosier, mace, wand, or otherwise, has its origin in each case in one of two ideas. Sometimes it is an instrument of correction; thus the churchwarden’s staff, the wand or rod of a royal usher, and of a beadle, and probably also the mace of a mayor, were all, like the fasces of a Roman governor, intended to correct the unruly, or to forcibly clear a way, when necessary, for the progress of the dignitary before whom they were borne. ”

“ If they come in here and find someone that they don't particularly want working here -- I don't even know who that would be, but there are a fair number of career staff here, and they could certainly make their own decisions about staffing when they get in here. ”

“ Free from the pressure of other cares and responsibilities an officer in this position would be more likely to see clearly and judge coolly than one overloaded with work and distracted with the thousand worries of command. This is the division of labour according to kind, which gives each sort of work to a man specially trained for its performance. ”

“ A consequence of the selection by which the corps is composed, and of the requirement of practical familiarity with the duties of leadership and with the life and spirit of the troops, is the constant passage of officers to and fro between regimental and general staff service, and their alternate employment in the various branches of the general staff itself. ”

“ Under present conditions we, staff and special service officers, have to turn our hand to every kind of job as occasion demands, and one man has to do the ordinary work of half a dozen different offices. ”

“ It may be argued, and we often do hear material dealers advance the theory, that to-day, with our interchangeable parts and the cheapness of all material, it is a waste of time to make a balance staff. ”

“ Such cases as your excited fancy pictures, do no doubt occur once in a thousand times among the common men, but a staff-officer, as your husband is, is not left to lie on the field. Besides, as a general rule, folks should not think about such horrid things. ”

“ It is one of the duties of the general staff to attend to the material well-being of the troops, so as to secure their being at all times in condition to march or to fight. The heads of the several departments specially concerned with this care can work efficiently only in so far as they are kept in touch of the military situation. ”

“ When any great event is transpiring in another land or another part of this country, and long messages are coming in concerning it, the staff has to be increased, and for this purpose men are drafted from the day staff. ”

“ I believe the Staff never hears a bullet whistle or sees a shell burst except through a telescope.
“I believe the Staff exists solely to find soft jobs for the wealthy and useless portion of the aristocracy. ”

“ The staff organization is undergoing constant changes. Its most improved form is to be found in France and Prussia. Our own staff system is of a composite, and, in some respects, heterogeneous character—not having been, constructed on any regular plan, but built up by gradual accretions and imitations of European features, from the time of our Revolution till the present. It has, however, worked with great vigor and efficiency. ”

“ The General Staff of an army in the field is so placed that within wide limits it can control what the public will perceive. It controls the selection of correspondents who go to the front, controls their movements at the front, reads and censors their messages from the front, and operates the wires. ”

“ There are French servants to do the roughest work, but the girls have plenty to do without that. The house staff begin work at seven in the morning; at seven-thirty in the evening they start to turn out the forty-two offices, which they sweep and dust every day. ”

“ It is true that you have hired a couple of men and a huge waggon. But these gentlemen are professionals. They direct the operation. They are the headquarters' staff, so to speak. Occasionally they take a hand in the game and then you wish they hadn't. ”

“ But since the salaries have been increased, now that real honour attaches to the humblest members of the profession, candidates arrive from all quarters, so that one is able to pick and choose, and form an excellent staff.... ”

“ You observe that he has a fine staff of assistants at his command;—agues, consumptions, fevers, inflammations, swords, robbers, hemlock, juries, tyrants,—not one of which gives them a moment’s concern so long as they are prosperous ”

“ The essential feature of the Prussian staff system consists in the classification of duties out of which it has arisen. Every general in the field requires a number of assistants, collectively forming his staff, to relieve him of matters of detail, to act as his confidential secretaries, and to represent him at places where he cannot be himself. The duties of command are so multifarious that some consistent distribution of functions among the officers of a large staff is indispensable. ”

“ Accordingly the great general staff has become a school of generalship, from which have emanated a series of masterpieces of military history and historical criticism, while its individual members have produced valuable works dealing with the various branches of the theory of the art of war. ”

“ The staff is about twenty or twenty-two inches in length, with it large and heavy head, which is often loaded with a quarter or half a pound of lead, wrapped in cat-gut, and securely fastened on, so that nothing but the greatest violence can separate it from the staff. ”

“ But there was no subdivision of functions in the modern sense. A staff was a group of officers attached temporarily to headquarters and available for any mission which the commander thought fit to give them, and in the highly centralized armies of those days these missions (as regards junior officers) were practically limited to orderly work and reconnaissance, especially topographical reconnais- sance. ”

“ I have seen staffs that were models as regards execution and finish, that were nearly worthless from a practical standpoint, simply because the maker had devoted all his time and energy to the execution of a beautiful piece of lathe work, and had given no thought or study to the form and size of the pivots. On the other hand, one often sees staffs whose pivots are faultless in shape, but the execution and finish so bungling as to offset all the good qualities as regards shape. ”

“ In this way authority and responsibility are graduated throughout the army corps. Every commander above the rank of captain deals with a body composed of units with the interior affairs of none of which he meddles, except in the case of failure on the part of the officer directly responsible. The higher the commander and the greater his authority, the more general becomes the supervision and the less the burden of detail. The superior prescribes the object to be attained. The subordinate is left free to choose the means, and is interfered with only in exceptional circumstances. ”