While military service alters, it does not create; the stolid Breton--stolid by comparison with the men of central and Southern France, remains stolid as before he went up for training, for the Army has grafted on him nothing that is new--it has merely added to his knowledge and developed, in the way of characteristics, what was already there. But the Breton is the better for his two years--without them he would be a very stolid and unimaginative person indeed, and he has learned to stir himself, to make the best of himself and the work that is his to perform. Similarly the traditional Frenchman, coming from the wine-growing districts of the south, and a hot-headed and impetuous individual, has his eccentricities modified, for hot-headedness does not pay in military service, and this man has learned to control himself just as the Breton has acquired a little more rapidity of movement. Yet the individual characteristics of the two types remain; personal traits have been modified by discipline, but not destroyed, for while the Army of the Republic creates nothing, it also annihilates nothing. The men have been moulded to a pattern, but they are the same men in essence, with no quality removed altogether. Usually, they are vastly improved.
Especially is this last true of the many youths who think--it is a common failing of youth--that they know everything and are capable of all things. The Army modifies their self-conceit; it teaches them that they are but as other men, needing to learn. It first of all destroys the unhealthy growth of unjustifiable self-confidence, reducing these men to utter self-abasement; then, on this foundation, the Army and the training it involves gradually build up, not a belief in self-powers, but a knowledge of the capacities and powers of self, of their limitations as well as their extent. The braggart who goes to his military training comes back chastened and, if he still boasts, it is of things that he is really capable of doing, knowledge that he has actually obtained--he makes no claims that he cannot justify, as a rule. This much the Army of France does for the men who pass through it and back to their normal tasks in life.
The life of the conscripts has been charged with blunting the finer sensibilities of those who have to undergo its rigours, but the charge cannot be allowed. For one might as well say that the engineer is rendered incapable of appreciating music, or the doctor has no conception of the beauty of a garden, by reason of the mathematical nature of the work accomplished by the one and the physical repulsiveness of much that the other has to perform. The Army and the training that it involves never injured a Frenchman yet, so long as the laws governing the Army received proper interpretation. In the end of the last century there were injustices prevalent both among men and officers, but the world and France gain wisdom with experience; the Republican Army as at present constituted is a growth of only forty years, and its predecessor, the Army of Napoleon the futile, showed by the war of 1870 what an immense amount of reform was necessary before French arms could regain their lustre. In the history of an army, forty years is a very short time, and, rather than cavil at the slowness with which reforms have been accomplished, it is due to France that one should admire the way in which the Army has been built up from so sorry a foundation into the great and effective machine of to-day.