i44 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTE LY 



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'elite de l'Europe"), 

 made "flesh for the cannon" in the rush of Napoleon's great cam- 

 paigns. 



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 : 



A boy will stop a bullet as well as a man. 



Says Professor Haeckel: 



The more vigorous and well-born a young man is, the more normally consti- 

 tuted, the greater his chance to be slain by musket or magazine, the rifled 

 cannon and other similar engines of civilization. 



Sa} r s Seeck: 



Napoleon, in a series of years seized all the youth of high stature and left 

 them scattered over many battlefields, so that the French people who followed 

 them are mostly of smaller stature. More than once since Napoleon's time 

 has the military limit been lowered. 



In the career of Napoleon campaign followed campaign, against 

 enemies, against neutrals, against friends. Conscription followed vic- 

 tory, both victory and conscription debasing the human species. Again 

 conscription after conscription. 



Let them die with arms in their hands. Their death is glorious, and it 

 will be avenged. You can always fill the places of soldiers. ... A great soldier 

 like me doesn't care a tinker's dam for the lives of a million men. 



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. 



Eaw conscripts raised before their time and hurriedly drafted into the line 

 had impaired its steadiness. 



After Moscow, homeward 

 amidst ever-deepening misery they struggled on, until of the six hundred 

 thousand men who had proudly crossed the Nieman for the conquest of Eussia, 

 only twenty thousand famished, frostbitten, unarmed specters staggered across 

 the bridge of Korno in the middle of December. . . . Despite the loss of the 

 most splendid army marshalled by man, Napoleon abated no whit of his resolve 

 to dominate Germany and discipline Eussia. ... He strained every effort to 

 call the youth of the empire to arms . . . and 350,000 conscripts were prom- 

 ised by the senate. The mighty swirl of the Moscow campaign sucked in 

 150,000 lads of under twenty years of age into the devouring vortex. . . . The 

 peasantry gave up their sons as food for cannon. 



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 



