Young men who have the means to purchase an immunity can obtain one for only two years.  One year they must serve, parade, drill, march, and mount guard, though they are not required to live in the barracks.  Occasional cases of hardship or injustice occur.  We know of a poor, but promising pianist whose studies were cut short and his fingers stiffened by the three-years’ service.  Leaving out of view exceptional facts, the system works well.  All the youth of the country acquire health, strength, an upright carriage, and habits of punctuality and cleanliness.  The clumsy rustic is soon licked into shape, and leaves his barrack, to return to the fields, a soldier and a more self-reliant man.  Prussia, too, secures the services of an army, in time of need, commensurate in numbers with the adult male population.

The French conscript, if he draws the unlucky number, can buy a substitute.  All are not enrolled as recruits; and all those so enrolled are not obliged to serve.  The only sons of widows, and some other persons, are always exempt.  Once in “the line,” however, the young man is engaged for five or seven years, and receives a training in matters gymnastic and military which turns out the best soldiers in Europe.

Little would one imagine, as he passes the groups of dainty and scrupulously neat French officers upon the boulevards, looking the laziest persons in the world, that these seeming carpet-knights are out upon the Champ de Mars at three o’clock in the morning, and often drill until nine or ten in the forenoon,—­or that the little toulourou, as he is nicknamed, or private of the ligne, in his brick-colored trowsers and clean gaiters, whose voice is the gayest and whose legs are the nimblest in the barrier-ball, has done a day’s work of parade and gymnastics which equals the toil of an ouvrier.  Running, swimming, climbing, and fencing with the bayonet, are often but the preludes of long marches on duty, or equally long walks to reach the parade-ground, or to fetch the daily rations of the “mess.”  Then, too, during several months of summer, camp-life is led on a grand scale.  Vast encampments, which for size, regularity, and order vie with the old Roman castra, are formed at convenient spots.  And here all the details of actual service are imitated; cavalry and infantry are disciplined in equally arduous labors; nor does the artillery escape the fatigue of mock-sieges, sham-fights, and reviews.

The Chasseurs de Vincennes, or rifle-corps, are the pride of the army.  Their training is still more severe.  They are all athletic men, taught to march almost upon the run, and to go through evolutions with the rapidity of bush-fighters.  There are few more stirring sights than a French regiment upon the march.  Advancing in loose order, and with a long, swinging gait, their guns at an angle of forty-five degrees, lightly carried upon the shoulder, they impart an idea of alertness and efficiency which no other soldiers present to the same degree.