But while fully recognising in Buonaparte the eager gambler who ventures on many a mad extreme, we may justly say that he and the revolutionary generals who preceded him dispelled a powerful prejudice in respect to the subsistence of troops, and showed that it should never be looked upon in any other light than as a condition of war, never as an object.
Besides, it is with privation in war just as with physical exertion and danger; the demands which the general can make on his army are without any defined bounds; an iron character demands more than a feeble sensitive man; also the endurance of an army differs in degree, according as habit, military spirit, confidence in and affection towards the commander, or enthusiasm for the cause of fatherland, sustain the will and energy of the soldier. But this we may look upon as an established principle, that privation and want, however far they may be carried, should never be otherwise regarded than as transition-states which should be succeeded by a state of abundance, indeed even by superfluity. Can there be any thing more touching than the thought of so many thousand soldiers, badly clothed, with packs on their backs weighing thirty or forty pounds, toiling over every kind of road, in every description of weather, for days and days continually on the march, health and life for ever in peril, and for all that unable to get a sufficiency of dry bread. Any one who knows how often this happens in war, is at a loss to know how it does not oftener lead to a refusal of the will and powers to submit any longer to such exactions, and how the mere bent constantly given to the imagination of human beings in one direction, is capable of first calling forth, and then supporting such incredible efforts.