Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/301

  cantons, a resident local functionary prepared to pay him.

Let us, however, suppose that all these difficulties have been surmounted, and let us now follow the men to the depots of their regiments. Their arms, uniforms, and equipments are ready for them there; the men receive them, put them on, and then wait until the number of each article is inscribed in the books. The crowding is tremendous; the men are all on each other's backs, and in each other's way. According to the loi des cadres, the depot consists of two companies — that is to say, in peace time of about one hundred and fifty men; but the mobilization of the whole regiment brings in more than twenty-five hundred men on the same day! Where are they to be put? — where are they even to stand? There is another danger here, and it will be well to look to it in time.

Each of the sixteen companies of the regiment sends a cadre de conduite to the depot to fetch the men which belong to it. Each cadre is composed of one officer and a few non-commissioned officers and steady privates. Directly each group is complete, the men are marched away to the company.

But where is the company? In certain cases the depot is quartered with the service companies; but as a rule it is detached from them, and may be even at some distance. Until the late war they were always separated from each other; but such extreme inconvenience resulted from this cause during the mobilization of 1870, that the principle of keeping the service and depot companies together has been laid down since. In consequence, however, of the new distribution of the army into permanent regional corps, many regiments are quartered in places where no garrisons previously existed, and where, consequently, there are no barracks. The army, on its peace footing, is more numerous than it used to be. The abundant barracks which existed in Alsace-Lorraine have disappeared. For these various reasons, therefore, though the building of new barracks has gone on actively — though about nine millions sterling have been voted for them from State and municipal sources — it has not yet been found practicable to provide room enough in the casernes of each region to lodge the depots with the regiments. Two years must still pass before the change can be completely effected. It is only in the 1st and 7th corps (Lille and Besançon) that the measure is thus far regularly applied. In the 2d corps, two regiments out of eight are separated from their depots; four regiments are in the same condition in the 3d and 4th corps: and so on with the others.

Another cause of difficulty in bringing together the depots and the regiments arises from the special organization which has been adopted for the garrisons of Paris and Lyons. The French active army is recruited all over the territory; conscripts from all the provinces are mixed up in the same regiment; and not only is no attempt made to group together men of the same department, but care is even taken to prevent that result, it being considered, for both special and general reasons, that great inconvenience would accrue from the bestowal of a local character on the regiments of the active army. But with the men of the reserve, as has been explained, the exactly opposite system is employed; they are attached exclusively (for the infantry, at least) to regiments permanently quartered in their own region; and the territorial army is composed on the same principle. For the troops of Paris, however (and to some extent for those of Lyons), an exception has been made; the reservists of the departments of the Seine and Seine-et-Oise are attached to corps d'armée of four different regions, whose headquarters and regimental depots are not in Paris, but in those regions. The result is that, in the event of a mobilization, all the reservists in Paris would have first to start off to their depots at Amiens, Orleans, Rouen, Laval, Le Mans, and all sorts of equally distant places, in order to get them equipped, and then to return to Paris, or go elsewhere, to their regiments. When it is remembered that the garrison of Paris and its neighborhood amounts to 120,000 men (more than a quarter of the whole active army), it will be recognized that a serious cause of delay will arise here. And there exists no present reason for supposing that this difficulty will ever be got over. It should, however, be added that, in peace time, this system presents many serious advantages: 'it mixes up the Parisians with the rural soldiers; it does not encumber the Paris barracks (where there is no space to spare), with the extra men belonging to the depots; and it keeps the system of corps d'armée intact and separate from the huge mixed garrison of Paris, which does not form a permanent corps d'armée by itself, but is 