Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/148

144 unbridled ambition. Four millions there were in all, more than half of them Frenchmen. And behind the legions shown or hinted at, one seems to discern the millions on millions who might have been and are not—the huge widening wedge of the possible descendants of those who fell in battle, youth without blemish ("l'élite de l'Europe"), made "flesh for the cannon" in the rush of Napoleon's great campaigns.

These came from the farm, the workshop, the school, "the best that the nation could bring," men from eighteen to thirty-five years of age at first, but afterwards the older and the younger. Napoleon said:

Says Professor Haeckel:

Says Seeck:

In the career of Napoleon campaign followed campaign, against enemies, against neutrals, against friends. Conscription followed victory, both victory and conscription debasing the human species. Again conscription after conscription.

Still more conscription. After Wagram, France began to feel its weakness, the "Grand Army" being no longer the army which had fought at Ulm and Jena.

After Moscow, homeward

But

many were appalled at the frightful drain on the nation's strength. . . . In less than half a year after the loss of half a million men a new army nearly as numerous was marshalled under the imperial eagles. But the majority were