SOME EFFECTS. ACTIVE SERVICE
One of the principal effects of a conscript system such as that of
France is that the great majority of the population of the country
is characterised by fixed habits and ideas with regard to the way in
which work should be done. The Latin races are all marked by a certain
flexibility and dexterity of mind, a quickness of apprehension which
is absent, for the most part, from other Caucasian stock, and military
training increases this and applies it to physical use as well as to
mental qualities. The conscript, back in civilian life at the end of
his training, is to be compared to the sailor of the British Navy in
many respects; he has learned a certain handiness, a dexterity in
connection with his daily work, and it is a lesson that stays with him,
as a rule, to the end of his life.
While military service alters, it does not create; the stolid
Breton--stolid by comparison with the men of central and Southern
France, remains stolid as before he went up for training, for the
Army has grafted on him nothing that is new--it has merely added to
his knowledge and developed, in the way of characteristics, what was
already there. But the Breton is the better for his two years--without
them he would be a very stolid and unimaginative person indeed, and
he has learned to stir himself, to make the best of himself and the
work that is his to perform. Similarly the traditional Frenchman,
coming from the wine-growing districts of the south, and a hot-headed
and impetuous individual, has his eccentricities modified, for
hot-headedness does not pay in military service, and this man has
learned to control himself just as the Breton has acquired a little
more rapidity of movement. Yet the individual characteristics of the
two types remain; personal traits have been modified by discipline, but
not destroyed, for while the Army of the Republic creates nothing, it
also annihilates nothing. The men have been moulded to a pattern, but
they are the same men in essence, with no quality removed altogether.
Usually, they are vastly improved.
Especially is this last true of the many youths who think--it is a
common failing of youth--that they know everything and are capable
of all things. The Army modifies their self-conceit; it teaches
them that they are but as other men, needing to learn. It first of
all destroys the unhealthy growth of unjustifiable self-confidence,
reducing these men to utter self-abasement; then, on this foundation,
the Army and the training it involves gradually build up, not a belief
in self-powers, but a knowledge of the capacities and powers of self,
of their limitations as well as their extent. The braggart who goes to
his military training comes back chastened and, if he still boasts,
it is of things that he is really capable of doing, knowledge that he
has actually obtained--he makes no claims that he cannot justify, as a
rule. This much the Army of France does for the men who pass through it
and back to their normal tasks in life.
The life of the conscripts has been charged with blunting the finer
sensibilities of those who have to undergo its rigours, but the
charge cannot be allowed. For one might as well say that the engineer
is rendered incapable of appreciating music, or the doctor has no
conception of the beauty of a garden, by reason of the mathematical
nature of the work accomplished by the one and the physical
repulsiveness of much that the other has to perform. The Army and the
training that it involves never injured a Frenchman yet, so long as the
laws governing the Army received proper interpretation. In the end of
the last century there were injustices prevalent both among men and
officers, but the world and France gain wisdom with experience; the
Republican Army as at present constituted is a growth of only forty
years, and its predecessor, the Army of Napoleon the futile, showed by
the war of 1870 what an immense amount of reform was necessary before
French arms could regain their lustre. In the history of an army, forty
years is a very short time, and, rather than cavil at the slowness with
which reforms have been accomplished, it is due to France that one
should admire the way in which the Army has been built up from so sorry
a foundation into the great and effective machine of to-day.
In civilian France, military ways persist. Habits of neatness and
method, and accuracy in trifles, attest the military training that men
have undergone. The very step of a Frenchman walking is reminiscent
of the days when he was taught to march, and he has a respect for
and knowledge of firearms which the average civilian of English
life--unless he be addicted to some form of sport--never acquires. The
Frenchman is never at a loss with a sporting gun, knows better than
to point the weapon at the head of another man when loading, and in
other ways betrays familiarity with the tool of a craft--one that many
Englishmen regard as something to be handled carelessly or passed by
as a thing of mystery. This is given only as an instance of the many
ways in which the conscript system modifies men, for there are many
ways in which modifications are effected. Some students of the subject
question whether the French flexuousness and adaptability are results
of the military system of the Republic or whether they are ingrained in
the race independently of military training. Since practically every
citizen is a soldier, this is a point that cannot be easily determined,
but there can be no doubt that the characteristics in question are
increased by military service.
Every Frenchman who has passed through the Army is in possession of
a little book which he guards most jealously, since in that book are
inserted full particulars of his term of service with the colours, and
all things relating to his military history, as well as details of his
duties in case of mobilisation of the Army. The little book of the
ex-conscript is to him what "marriage lines" are to a woman--except
that the ex-conscript incurs penalties if he loses his book, while
the woman who loses her "marriage lines" can always get another copy
as long as the register containing particulars of the ceremony is in
existence.
It must be understood that, in case of need arising for the
mobilisation of the Army, the body of men brought to the colours is
so great that some system must be followed in bringing them on to a
war footing. The little book contains particulars of the place at
which the conscript on the reserve is to report himself, together
with the day of mobilisation on which he will be required to join the
colours--the actual mobilisation is spread over a period of days, in
order that some men--the first line troops--may be drafted out to their
posts before the rest come in. When the order for mobilisation has
been given out--by the ringing of bells, proclamation by criers, and
in various other ways--the reservist immediately consults his little
book, and ascertains on what date he will have to present himself to
the authorities, and at what station he is expected to rejoin. His wife
or his mother or sister cooks him food for the day of his going, and,
after a prayer at some wayside shrine or in some sanctuary, and perhaps
an offering vowed to the Virgin or to the patron saint, the citizen
sets out to become a soldier again. August, 1914, was the first time
of complete mobilisation in the history of the Third Republic, and the
system under which the men were gathered back to the colours worked
smoothly in all its details. There was no confusion anywhere; to each
man his place, to each unit its place, and the Army Corps went out to
the Belgian frontier or to the edge of the provinces that slope down
toward the Rhine, with ominous celerity, and with those interminable
regimental songs sounding as they sound when men go out to manoeuvres
at the end of the soldiers' year. The hour for which this Army had been
prepared had come, and the Army was found ready to meet the hour.
Although the effective strength of the French Army, when the last man
has been armed and placed in the field, is about 4,800,000 men, it
must not be supposed that the Republic maintains all these numbers as
a fighting force in the field throughout the campaign. About a million
and a half of men go out as the "first line," and from those who remain
this line is strengthened as and where required. It has become clear
since the battle of the Marne that almost a second army was collected
under the shelter of the Paris forts to reinforce the retreating line
of men who fell back from the Belgian frontier, and in this connection
it may be noted that the traditional French method of conducting war is
with sixty per cent of the men in the firing line, and the remaining
forty per cent in rear as reserves. France's conduct of the war against
Germany has shown that this method of fighting--diametrically opposed
to the German conception of war--is still being adhered to, and the
troops in the firing line by no means compose the whole of the French
striking force.
As to active service in the French Army, the general English view
is that the French soldier, with the exception of the Algerian
garrison, sees no service outside European bounds, and the deeds of
French soldiers are ignored as regards French colonial possessions
and expeditions. In the expedition to Tonquin, to which reference
has already been made in connection with the Foreign Legion of the
French Army, there were deeds done by individuals and by regiments
that are worthy of memory besides the brilliant exploits of our own
Army. It is not only to the war in the Crimea and the present campaign
that we must look for evidence of the indomitable courage that the
French undoubtedly possess, but also to service on the French colonial
battlefields, in Chinese swamps and African wilds.
The present campaign has proved that French soldiers are capable of
retreating in good order when strategy renders a retreat necessary--a
feat hitherto deemed impossible to the army whose sole strength was
supposed to consist in its power of impetuous attack. The retreat
from the Belgian frontier has rendered necessary a reconstruction of
ideas as regards French psychology, and has shown that the training
imposed on the conscripts of France in time of peace was the best that
could be applied. Just as in the field the best general is the best
psychologist, so in time of peace the best administration is that
which, regardless of criticism of its methods, prepares its men most
effectively for war, selecting the form of training to be applied in
a way that takes into consideration the mental characteristics and
temperament of the material required to be trained. The merits of the
form of training selected can only be determined by the effectiveness
of the trained material in action, and, granting these things, the
conduct of the French Army in the present campaign is a splendid
vindication of the peace training of that Army. The first stages of
the war have been all against the French way of fighting--the way in
which the French soldier is supposed to exhibit himself at his best;
yet in retreat, and in action approximating in length and tedium to the
monotony and continued exertion of siege warfare, the French soldier
has given his commanders cause for pride.
Let it be remembered that the men who are fighting the battles of
France, and of all civilisation, on French soil in these closing months
of 1914 are not like the veterans with whom Napoleon won his battles.
The wars of the Napoleonic era, lasting for years as they did, brought
into the field a host of trained men--trained in war by the practice
of war, rather than by experiments under peace conditions; from the
time of the Revolution onward there were sufficient veteran soldiers,
seasoned in real warfare, to stiffen the ranks of any army that might
be raised to attack--neither to retreat nor to defend, but to attack
in accordance with French tradition. The Army of the Republic to-day
is made up of men who have had two years' training apiece (with the
exception of the small percentage of _re-engagés_, who also have had
no war service) under peace conditions, and who for the most part have
never seen a shot fired in anger, as the phrase goes. Yet out of this
semi-raw material (semi-raw as far as war experience goes) France has
raised an Army which may without exaggeration be termed magnificent,
an Army that has kept the field under harder circumstances than those
which brought about the surrender of Sedan, an Army that no more knows
when it is beaten than does the British force fighting by its side.
End of Project Gutenberg's The French Army From Within, by Anonymous