But how these things may act on the rude soldier-mind, with its military pedantries, its inexperience of all that lies off the parade-ground; inexperience as of a child, yet fierceness of a man and vehemence of a Frenchman!  It is long that secret communings in mess-room and guard-room, sour looks, thousandfold petty vexations between commander and commanded, measure every where the weary military day.  Ask Captain Dampmartin; an authentic, ingenious literary officer of horse; who loves the Reign of Liberty, after a sort; yet has had his heart grieved to the quick many times, in the hot South-Western region and elsewhere; and has seen riot, civil battle by daylight and by torchlight, and anarchy hatefuller than death.  How insubordinate Troopers, with drink in their heads, meet Captain Dampmartin and another on the ramparts, where there is no escape or side-path; and make military salute punctually, for we look calm on them; yet make it in a snappish, almost insulting manner:  how one morning they ‘leave all their chamois shirts’ and superfluous buffs, which they are tired of, laid in piles at the Captain’s doors; whereat ‘we laugh,’ as the ass does, eating thistles:  nay how they ’knot two forage-cords together,’ with universal noisy cursing, with evident intent to hang the Quarter-master:—­all this the worthy Captain, looking on it through the ruddy-and-sable of fond regretful memory, has flowingly written down. (Dampmartin, Evenemens, i. 122-146.) Men growl in vague discontent; officers fling up their commissions, and emigrate in disgust.

Or let us ask another literary Officer; not yet Captain; Sublieutenant only, in the Artillery Regiment La Fere:  a young man of twenty-one; not unentitled to speak; the name of him is Napoleon Buonaparte.  To such height of Sublieutenancy has he now got promoted, from Brienne School, five years ago; ‘being found qualified in mathematics by La Place.’  He is lying at Auxonne, in the West, in these months; not sumptuously lodged—­’in the house of a Barber, to whose wife he did not pay the customary degree of respect;’ or even over at the Pavilion, in a chamber with bare walls; the only furniture an indifferent ’bed without curtains, two chairs, and in the recess of a window a table covered with books and papers:  his Brother Louis sleeps on a coarse mattrass in an adjoining room.’  However, he is doing something great:  writing his first Book or Pamphlet,—­eloquent vehement Letter to M. Matteo Buttafuoco, our Corsican Deputy, who is not a Patriot but an Aristocrat, unworthy of Deputyship.  Joly of Dole is Publisher.  The literary Sublieutenant corrects the proofs; ’sets out on foot from Auxonne, every morning at four o’clock, for Dole:  after looking over the proofs, he partakes of an extremely frugal breakfast with Joly, and immediately prepares for returning to his Garrison; where he arrives before noon, having thus walked above twenty miles in the course of the morning.’