‘Indifference to life,’ I said, ’and indifference to danger have little in common.  General Fenelon told me that in Algeria he had more than once to preside at an execution.  No Arab showed any fear.  Once there were two men, one of whom was to be flogged, the other to be shot.  A mistake was made and they were going to shoot the wrong man.  It was found out in time, but neither of the men seemed to care about it; yet they would probably have run away in battle.  The Chinese are not brave, but you can hire a man to be beheaded in your place.’

‘So,’ said Ampere, ’you could always hire a substitute in our most murderous wars, when in the course of a year a regiment was killed twice over.  It was hiring a man, not indeed to be beheaded, but to be shot for you.’

‘The destructiveness,’ said Beaumont, ’of a war is only gradually known.  It is found out soonest in the villages when the deaths of the conscripts are heard of, or are suspected from their never returning; but in the towns, from which the substitutes chiefly come, it may be long undiscovered.  Nothing is known but what is officially published, and the Government lies with an audacity which seems always to succeed.  If it stated the loss of men in a battle at one half of the real number, people would fancy that it ought to be doubled, and so come near to the truth; but it avows only one-tenth or only one-twentieth, and then the amount of falsehood is underestimated.’

‘Marshal Randon,’ I said, ’told me that the whole loss in the Italian campaign was under 7,000 men.’

‘That is a good instance,’ said Beaumont.  ’It certainly was 50,000, perhaps 70,000.  But I am guilty of a delit in saying so, and you will be guilty of a delit if you repeat what I have said.  I remember the case of a man in a barber’s shop in Tours, to whom the barber said that the harvest was bad.  He repeated the information, and was punished by fine and imprisonment for having spread des nouvelles alarmantes.  Truth is no excuse; in fact it is an aggravation, for the truer the news the more alarming.’

‘In time of peace,’ I asked, ’what proportion of the conscripts return after their six years of service?’

‘About three-quarters,’ answered Beaumont.

‘Then,’ I said, ’as you take 100,000 conscripts every year even in peace, you lose 25,000 of your best young men every year?’

‘Certainly,’ said Beaumont.

‘And are the 75,000 who return improved or deteriorated?’ I asked.

‘Improved,’ said Ampere; ’they are degourdis, they are educated, they submit to authority, they know how to shift for themselves.’

‘Deteriorated,’ said Beaumont.  ’A garrison life destroys the habits of steady industry, it impairs skill.  The returned conscript is more vicious and less honest than the peasant who has not left his village.’

‘And what was the loss,’ I asked, ‘in the late war?’