Of the details of such marches I have often written. I wish now to speak of
another thing, which, in long accounts of mere rumbling of guns, one might
never have time to tell, but which is really the most important of all
experiences under arms in France--I mean the older civilians, the fathers.
Who made the French army? Who determined to recover from the defeats and
to play once more that determined game which makes up half French history,
the "Thesaurization," the gradual reaccumulation of power? The general
answer to such questions is to say: "The nation being beaten had to set
to and recover its old position." That answer is insufficient. It deals
in abstractions and it tells you nothing. Plenty of political societies
throughout history have sat down under disaster and consented to sink
slowly. Many have done worse--they have maintained after sharp warnings
the pride of their blind years; they have maintained that pride on into
the great disasters, and when these came they have sullenly died. France
neither consented to sink nor died by being overweening. Some men must
have been at work to force their sons into the conscription, to consent
to heavy taxation, to be vigilant, accumulative, tenacious, and, as it
were, constantly eager. There must have been classes in which, unknown to
themselves, the stirp of the nation survived; individuals who, aiming at
twenty different things, managed, as a resultant, to carry up the army
to the pitch in which I had known it and to lay a slow foundation for
recovered vigour.
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