Abuses there have been in France, as was inevitable in a system like this, and this general call to the colours inflicted an enormous amount of suffering upon men who would have suffered more willingly if it had been to serve France usefully.  But in thousands and hundreds of thousands of cases there was no useful purpose served.  General Joffre had as many men as he could manage along the fighting lines.  More would have choked up his lines of communication and the whole machinery of the war.  But behind the front there were millions of men in reserve, and behind them vast bodies of men idling in depots, crowded into barracks, and eating their hearts out for lack of work.  They had been forced to abandon their homes and their professions, and yet during the whole length of the war they found no higher duty to do for France than sweep out a barrack-yard or clean out a military latrine.  It was especially hard upon the reformes—­men of delicate health who had been exempted from their military service in their youth but who now were re-examined by the Conseil de Revision and found “good for auxiliary service in time of war.”

To the old soldiers who have done their three years a return to the barracks is not so distressing.  They know what the life is like and the rude discipline of it does not shock them.  But to the reforme, sent to barracks for the first time at thirty-five or forty years of age, it is a moral sacrifice which is almost unendurable.  After the grief of parting from his wife and children and the refinements of his home, he arrives at the barracks inspired by the best sentiments, happy in the idea of being useful to his country, of serving like other Frenchmen.  But when he has gone through the great gate, guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, when he has changed his civil clothes for an old and soiled uniform, when he has found that his bed is a filthy old mattress in a barn where hundreds of men are quartered, when he has received for the first time certain brief and harsh orders from a sous-officier, and finally, when he goes out again into the immense courtyard, surrounded by high grey walls, a strange impression of solitude takes hold of him, and he finds himself abandoned, broken and imprisoned.

Many of these reformes are men of delicate health, suffering from heart or chest complaints, but in these barracks there is no comfort for the invalid.  I know one of them in which nearly seven hundred men slept together in a great garret, with only one window and a dozen narrow skylights, so that the atmosphere was suffocating above their rows of straw trusses, rarely changed and of indescribable filth.  But what hurts the spirits of men who have attained good positions in civil life, who have said to this man “Go!” and he goeth, and to that man “Come!” and he cometh, is to find their positions reversed and to be under the orders of a corporal or sergeant with a touch of the bully about him, happy to dominate men more educated and more intelligent than himself.  I can quote an example of an aristocrat who, in spite of his splendid chateau in the country, was mobilized as a simple soldat.