Adjutant — an assisting officer or aide-de-camp, attached to commanders of larger or smaller bodies of troops. As a rule, every commander of an infantry battalion or a cavalry regiment has an adjutant; the commanders of brigades, divisions, and army corps, and the commander-in-chief have one or more, according to the importance of the command. The adjutant has to make known the orders of his chief and to see to their execution, as well as to receive or collect the reports intended for his chief. He is therefore to a great extent responsible for the internal organisation of his body of troops. He regulates the routine of service between the corresponding divisions and issues the orders of the day; at the same time, he is a kind of secretary to his chief, carries on the correspondence with outside departments and superior authorities, arranges the daily reports and returns into summaries, and keeps the diary and statistics of his body of troops. Larger bodies of troops are nowadays usually provided with a regular staff, recruited from the staff of the army and placed under a “chief of staff”. The latter takes over the higher functions of the adjutant and leaves to the adjutant merely the transmission of orders and the disposition of the routine internal service of the corps. The procedure in such cases is, however, so different in the various armies that it is impossible to give even a general picture of it here. Thus there are scarcely two armies in which the duties of the adjutant of an army corps commander are entirely identical. Alongside these actual adjutants, in conformity with the requirements of monarchical institutions, hordes of nominal adjutant-generals of the monarch have been created in almost all European states, whose functions exist only in appearance, except when they are ordered to duty with their master; and even then these functions are of a purely formal nature.