The chief aim is, of course, to defeat the enemy, and to do this an army must be prepared to move rapidly.

Means of transport, so necessary in peace, are even more urgently needed in war.

Thus Washington always needed military engineers to construct roads and bridges.

Before the Revolution the greater part of such services had been provided in America by the regular British army, now the enemy.

British officers declared that the American army was without engineers who knew the science of war, and certainly the forts on which they spent their skill in the North, those on the lower Hudson, and at Ticonderoga, at the head of Lake George, fell easily before the assailant.