Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/17

  to be strictly exact; but as to the main fact that the effective force of the French army had been reduced to a very low ebb indeed in the summer of 1870, no doubt is possible; for General de Palikao, who was minister of war from 10th August to 4th September 1870, uses the following words in his book, "Un Ministère de Vingt-quatre Jours." In speaking of the plebiscite he says: "The result of this political act was to show Europe that the total number of men present in our army was only 250,000." This figure is, however, too low, and was used probably as expressing the number of fighting men, after deducting the non-combatants. Still, reduced as the army was in fact, the theoretical number of disposable men stood, as we have said, at 565,000. Let us see what this produced in reality on the outbreak of war.

In his evidence before the commission of the Chamber, Maréchal le Bœuf put in a written statement, from which it results that, on the 2d of August, the entire army of the Rhine, including the troops of McMahon, and even the corps of Canrobert, which was not then really formed, amounted to 244,000 men; and that figure is confirmed by General Frossard in his book on the operations of the corps which he commanded. But this included, necessarily, such of the men on leave, and such of the reservists, as had had time to reach their regiments since they were called out on the 14th of July, nineteen days before. It may be guessed, under all the circumstances, that the men of these two classes who had managed to join their corps by the 2d of August must have represented somewhere about 44,000; so that, if that estimate be correct, the number of men of the Rhine army who were with the colours before the war was about 200,000. If the number of leave-men and reservists exceeded 44,000, then the 200,000 must of course, be proportionately diminished, which would make the previous situation worse still; for it appears in the evidence that all the other troops in France, in Algeria, and at Civita Vecchia, irrespective of those incorporated in the army of the Rhine, did not, on or about the 20th of July, exceed 93,000, made up as follows: —

Consequently, we can only discover, altogether, about 293,000 men (which we have previously put roundly at 300,000) as having been under arms before the declaration of war, instead of the 400,000 voted in the budget.

To this original basis of 293,000 men we have now to add the 107,000 who (to make up 400,000) must evidently have been on leave, and also the 165,000 of the reserve. The former were of course soldiers, but the same cannot possibly be said of the latter. All the reservists, it is true, had been in the army, and had consequently received a military education; but since they had finished their term they had never been called out for exercise, and scarcely any of them had ever seen a chassepot, for that arm had been introduced into the service after the greater part of them had left it. Furthermore, most of them considered themselves to be virtually freed from any further obligations towards their country; and it was proved by thousands of lamentable examples, that it was not with any lively feeling of discipline or duty that they found themselves called upon to rejoin. It is worthwhile to quote one instance out of many, of the disorder which reigned amongst them. We will take it from an interesting book on the action of the railways during the war, which has been published by M. Jacqmin, manager of the Eastern Company. He says: "From the third or fourth day (after the declaration of war), our stations, like those of every line in France, were encumbered with soldiers of the reserve belonging to every regiment in the army; they were grouped by the district intendants under the orders of non-commissioned officers, but the latter had no authority over their detachments, and knew nothing of the men who composed them. The result was that men kept dropping off on the way, and that these isolated soldiers soon formed a floating mass which wandered about the roads and railway stations, living at the cost of any charitable persons they could find, but never reaching their corps. At the end of August the station at Reims had to be defended against an attempt at pillage made by a band of 4,000 or 5,000 of these men, who had given up all idea of joining their regiments." It is fair, however, to add that, in many cases, these men