Adjutant

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Adjutant, an assistant officer or aide-de-camp attached to commanders of larger or smaller bodies of troops. Generally every commander of a battalion of infantry, or of a regiment of cavalry, has an adjutant; the chiefs of brigades, divisions, corps d’armée, and the commander-in-chief, have one or more as the importance of the command may require. The adjutant has to make known the commands of his chief, and to see to their execution, as well as to receive or collect the reports intended for his chief. He has, therefore, in his charge, to a great extent, the internal economy of his body of troops. He regulates the rotation of duty among its component parts, and gives out the daily orders; at the same time, he is a sort of clerk to his chief, carries on the correspondence with detachments and with the superior authorities, arranges the daily reports and returns into tabular form, and keeps the journal and statistical books of his body of troops. Larger bodies of troops now generally have a regular staff attached—taken from the general staff of the army, and under a “chief of the staff,” who takes to himself the higher functions of adjutant, and leaves him merely the transmission of orders and the regulation of the internal routine duty of the corps. The arrangements in such cases, however, are so different in different armies, that it is impossible to give even a general view of them. In no two armies, for instance, are the functions of an adjutant to a general commanding a corps d’armée exactly alike. Beside these real adjutants, the requirements of monarchical institutions have created in almost all European states hosts of titular adjutantsgeneral to the monarch, whose functions are imaginary, except when called upon to do duty with their master; and even then, these functions are of a purely formal kind.