IMPRESSIONS OF MILITARY LIFE IN FRANCE 367 



commissioned officers, so strict about trifles, sympathized with the 

 drunkards and shielded them, and the penalties were so severe that the 

 officers themselves often preferred to close their eyes. The old ideal of 

 the eighteenth century soldier, " le vin, l'amour et le tabac," remains 

 unchanged to this day. Home-sickness, chiefly among peasants, the 

 squalor and monotony of barrack life among clerks and even students, 

 often lead to a sort of dull despair, which seeks relief in drink (some- 

 times in suicide, too — there are occasional epidemics). On the evening 

 of July 14 there were hardly half a dozen men sober in the whole com- 

 pany of a hundred. 



The officers had no moralizing influence. The superior officers were 

 seldom seen and greatly feared. The subalterns (captains and lieuten- 

 ants) belonged to three groups: (1) A few clever, ambitious young 

 men. These, all too rare anyway, scorned the routine of barrack life. 

 They spent little time with the men ; they studied, or managed to be sent 

 abroad or in the colonies on a mission, or served at headquarters and on 

 the general staff. (2) A large group of young men of means and leis- 

 ure, not a few belonging to the old nobility. They serve because it is a 

 family tradition, because a man must do something, because of the social 

 prestige of the uniform — not seldom with a view to the larger price 

 which officers command in the matrimonial market in the form of a 

 dowry. They are, on the whole, amiable, inefficient and totally without 

 prestige with their men. The old military caste, still the backbone of 

 the German army, is merely an uninteresting survival in France. Dis- 

 trusted by the government on account of their royalist opinions, without 

 hope or desire of reaching the highest positions, they give a contagious 

 example of indifference and idleness. (3) Men risen from the ranks — 

 efficient drill-masters as a rule; not seldom kind with their men in a 

 rough way; but often coarse, uncultured, intellectually paralyzed by 

 twenty years of garrison life. The pay is small, the standard of living 

 set by the officers of the second group is high ; plebeian or free-thinking 

 intruders are mercilessly snubbed. Silent or open rivalry of aristocrats 

 and commoners, of school-trained and unschooled officers; a general 

 spirit of uneasiness, listlessness and ennui; the most blindly patriotic 

 men not in sympathy with modern France ; with all these causes of divi- 

 sion, officers as a body can have no real influence on their troops. 



As for the non-commissioned officers, I think that Lucien Descaves's 

 sordid and disgusting book, " Sous-Offs," does not slander them. The pay 

 is exceedingly small (from twelve to thirty cents a day), the prospects of 

 promotion not very bright, the work not attractive to a normal, self-re- 

 specting man. Only actual failures, or men who shrink from responsi- 

 bilities in civil life, will take up military service (in subordinate ranks) 

 as a profession. "Working men despise them exactly as they despise flunk- 

 eys — and they have all the vices of flunkeys — laziness, arrogance and 



