aredevils are worth a hundred of him. I
think if I had been Trochu I would have issued an order that every
unmarried man in Paris between the ages of sixteen and forty-five should
be organized into, you might call it, the active National Guard for
continual service outside the walls, while the married men should be
reserved for defending the _enceinte_ at the last extremity. The outside
force might be but a third of the whole, but they would be worth as much
as the whole force together. That is why I think that our corps may
distinguish itself. We have none of us wives or families and nothing
much to lose, consequently we shall fight well. We shan't mind hardships
for we have not been accustomed to luxuries. We are fighting as
volunteers and not because the law calls us under arms.

"We are educated and have got too much self-respect to bolt like
rabbits. I don't say we may not retire. One can't do impossibilities,
and if others don't stand, we can't oppose a Prussian Army Corps. There
is one thing you must do, and that is preserve good discipline. There is
no discipline at all in the National Guard. I saw a party of them
yesterday drilling, and two or three of them quietly marched out of the
ranks and remonstrated on terms of the most perfect equality, with their
colonel as to an order he had given. The maxim of the Republic may do
for civil life, though I have not a shadow of belief either in equality
or fraternity; nor have I in liberty when liberty means license; whether
that be so or not equality is not consistent with military discipline.
An army in which the idea of equality reigns is not an army but a mob,
and is no more use for fighting purposes than so many armed peasants.
The Shibboleth is always absurd and in a case like the present ruinous.
The first duty of a soldier is obedience, absolute and implicit, and a
complete surrender of the right of private judgment."

"And you would obey an officer if you were sure that he were wrong,
Cuthbert?"

"Certainly I would. I might, if the mistake did not cost me my life,
argue the matter out with him afterwards, if, as might happen among us,
we were personal acquaintances; but I should at the same time carry out
the order, whatever it might be, to the best of my power. And now I
propose that for this evening we avoid the subject of the siege
altogether. In future, engaged as we are likely to be, we shall hardly
be able to avoid it, and moreover the bareness of the t