Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/14

4 the Second Empire had brought to light so many faults of organization and such incredible disorder of management, that it was scarcely possible to suppose that the government had not attempted to remove some at least of the defects which had been revealed. It was not reasonable to imagine that a system could have been left entirely unchanged which — to refer to one single class of examples only — had allowed 73,000 men to die in the Crimea of disease and privations, while only 20,000 were killed or died of their wounds; which, though of course on a much smaller scale, had reproduced in Lombardy nearly the same proportions of mortality; and which, according to Dr. Champouillon's report, had left badly wounded men so utterly without food during the Solferino campaign that many of them crawled from their beds into the roads in order to beg for bread. And yet it turned out that these "imperfections," as they were gracefully called, had produced no effects at all; that routine had kept things as they were; that no reforms whatever had been enforced or even proposed. The various army services remained exactly in their old condition; the teachings of the Russian, Italian, and Mexican wars were forgotten in victory; the French had conquered; a system which had provided triumph was taken to be, if not faultless, at all events quite good enough, notwithstanding its "imperfections:" and so everything went on unaltered. Indeed, so convinced was France of the ample sufficiency of her military arrangements, that in 1865 the Corps Législatif called for a reduction of the army, and the government did not dare to refuse it, for it was just beginning to struggle out of the fatal expedition to Mexico, which had cost £14,000,000 of confessed outlay, and nobody knew how much more of unavowed expenses. Considerable diminutions were effected: 2 regiments of heavy cavalry, 32 squadrons of other regiments, and 221 companies of infantry were suppressed; 1,268 officers were put on half-pay. But the very next year the Sadowa campaign occurred; France woke up victory ceased suddenly to seem a certainty; a universal feeling jumped into existence that the army was not strong enough, and that immediate measures must be taken to increase it. It was not generally imagined that the entire military organization of the country needed to be changed—that unsatisfactory conviction was, at that time, limited to a few wise men; but everybody became convinced that the number of soldiers must be instantly doubled. Yet notwithstanding the unanimity of this feeling, a strange delay occurred; the emperor and his advisers could not agree between themselves as to the plan to be adopted; they disputed over it so long that it was not until nearly eighteen months after Sadowa that Maréchal Niel, at that moment minister of war, was ready to bring forward his bill for enlarging the army; and that bill, which was waited for so long, was limited to the creation of the Garde Mobile. And then, as if it wished to proclaim to Europe that, in the eyes of France, number was everything in war and organization nothing, the Chamber refused to allow the minister to drill this new Mobile for so exorbitant a period as eight days at a time as he proposed; it reduced the periods of instruction to twelve hours, thinking, apparently, that as every Frenchman was born a soldier, that length of teaching was quite sufficient for him. And the minister bowed down his head before this childish folly, and told the Chamber that, though it really was a pity to so restrict the education of men who knew absolutely nothing, he would do what he could all the same: "it is for this reason," he added, "that I see with less regret the suppression of the eight days of drill, and I add that, without them, we will, do the best we possibly can." In this prodigious fashion was established the new force which was to render France a match for Germany! From that time forth the Garde Mobile was counted as representing some 500,000 available soldiers.

Maréchal Niel did, however, make an effort to introduce a few small improvements into the active army; unfortunately the effort did not last — he died in 1869; and though after the appearance of General Trochu's celebrated book in 