France usefully. But in thousands and hundreds of
thousands of cases there was no useful purpose served. General
Joffre had as many men as he could manage along the fighting lines.
More would have choked up his lines of communication and the
whole machinery of the war. But behind the front there were millions
of men in reserve, and behind them vast bodies of men idling in
depots, crowded into barracks, and eating their hearts out for lack of
work. They had been forced to abandon their homes and their
professions, and yet during the whole length of the war they found no
higher duty to do for France than sweep out a barrack-yard or clean
out a military latrine. It was especially hard upon the reformes--men of
delicate health who had been exempted from their military service in
their youth but who now were re-examined by the Conseil de
Revision and found "good for auxiliary service in time of war."

To the old soldiers who have done their three years a return to the
barracks is not so distressing. They know what the life is like and the
rude discipline of it does not shock them. But to the reforme, sent to
barracks for the first time at thirty-five or forty years of age, it is a
moral sacrifice which is almost unendurable. After the grief of parting
from his wife and children and the refinements of his home, he arrives
at the barracks inspired by the best sentiments, happy in the idea of
being useful to his country, of serving like other Frenchmen. But
when he has gone through the great gate, guarded by soldiers with
loaded rifles, when he has changed his civil clothes for an old and
soiled uniform, when he has found that his bed is a filthy old mattress
in a barn where hundreds of men are quartered, when he has
received for the first time certain brief and harsh orders from a sous-
officier, and finally, when he goes out again into the immense
courtyard, surrounded by high grey walls, a strange impression of
solitude takes hold of him, and he finds himself abandoned, broken
and imprisoned.

Many of these reformes are men of delicate health, suffering from
heart or chest complaints, but in these barracks there is no comfort
for the invalid. I know one of them in which nearly seven hundred
men slept together in a great garret, with only one window and a
dozen narrow skylights, so that the atmosphere was suffocating
above their rows of straw trusses, rarely changed and of
indescribable filth. But what hurts the spirits of