GENERAL BOURBAKI’S OAMPAIGN. 141 
hundreds had no socks and no boots, and parts of their feet were 
frozen. None had washed or changed their clothes for a long period. 
For three days they had neither food nor fodder, and even prior to that 
period of absolute famine one loaf was often shared between eight men.” 
How can this be explained, and what lesson can we draw from it? 
It is explained by General Vial in a very well written and truthful book. 
The whole fault was the folly of trying to improvise an army at all in 
the face of a trained, veteran, well-organised army, representing a nation 
in arms—not conscripts, but a nation in arms. ‘The levée en masse of 
1793 had to deal with armies recruited man by man, bought under the 
old system; and a nation of armies rising like the fabulous dragon’s 
teeth, of course, will wear out forces recruited by fragments. But this 
time the French were rising, 600,000 of them, not against armies re- 
cruited one by one from volunteers, but against a million of men (fora 
million of men were in France) every one of whom had had a military 
training, and every one of whose leaders knew the art of war. What 
is the use of a man who is an officer for three weeks trying to compete 
with a man who has been an officer for ten years? Here were colonels 
who had been very respectable commercial agents only a few weeks 
before! What was the German colonel? A very different kind of person. 
The legitimate chiefs of French military life were in Germany, and 
from a strategic point of view, the right thing for the French to have 
done was to have bowed to adversity. They ought to have yielded to 
fate and made the best terms that they could when their army was 
thoroughly beaten at Sedan. Their latter levies were badly led, badly 
organised, badly fed, and the whole thing proves that there is not 
the shghtest use in any nation trying to become a military nation in the 
middle of a war (applause). Gentlemen, there has been a great deal 
recently written about the command of the sea, and about the 
necessity for military preparedness, but certainly if the British race 
is not in a state of splendid preparation for war, it is not because 
the leading teachers of the British race have ever uttered any un- 
certain sound on the matter. I quite recognise and am pleased here 
to be able to recognise the splendid service done to the British race 
by a celebrated American writer, and it would be well if many 
Englishmen were infused with as much enthusiastic admiration for 
the prowess of this country as is the American naval author, Captain 
Mahan. But the wisdom of that great writer was anticipated word for 
word by Lord Bacon in the time of Hlizabeth, when he indicated the 
path that England must necessarily pursue if it was to have command 
of the Indies, and the command of the sea. I do not care in the 
slightest degree about all the cant of philosophical humanitarian 
charlatans; there is only one thing that can possibly preserve a nation, 
be it China, England, Germany, or any nation. “This is the most 
certain oracle of time,” as Lord Bacon said, that if you want to preserve 
your nation you must begin to study the art of war, not in the course 
of a war, but long before awar. If the French had been, as General 
Niel begged of them to be, organised like the Germans, Gambetta would 
not have sent 600,000 poor starving wretches against leaders like Von 
Goben, Prince Frederick Charles, the Duke of Mecklenburg, and Von 
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