cadres_, the officers attached to each battalion. We have increased
them by more than one third. So that if a war should break out we can
instantly--that is to say in three months, increase our army to 600,000
or even 700,000 men. Soldiers are never wanting in France, the difficulty
always is to find officers.'

'I hear,' I said, 'that you are making great improvements in your
artillery.'

'We are,' he answered. 'We are applying to it the principle of the Minie
musket, and we are improving the material. We hope to make our guns as
capable of resisting rapid and continued firing as well and as long as
the English and the Swedish guns, which are the best in Europe, can do.
And we find that we can throw a ball on the Minie principle with equal
precision twice as far. This will double the force of all our batteries.'

'Are _you_,' he asked me, 'among those who have taken shares in the
Russian railways?'

'No,' I said. 'They are the last that I wish to encourage.'

'Englishmen or Frenchmen,' he answered, 'who help Russia to make
railways, put me in mind of the Dutch who sold powder to their besiegers.

'The thinness of her population--that is, the vast space over which it is
scattered--alone prevents Russia from being the mistress of Europe. If
her 64,000,000 were as concentrated as our 34,000,000 are, she would be
irresistible. She loses always far more men in marching than in
fighting.'

'The events of the war,' I said, 'lead me to believe that the goodness of
the Russian soldier is exaggerated. They were always beaten, often by
inferior numbers.'

'In the first place,' he answered, 'those who were beaten at Sebastopol
were not the best Russian soldiers. They were short small men, generally
drawn from the neighbouring provinces. The Russian Imperial Guards and
the Russian Army in Poland are far superior to any that we encountered in
the Crimea. In the second place, they were ill commanded. The
improvements of weapons, of science and of discipline, have raised the
privates of all the great military nations to about the same level.
Success now depends on numbers and on generalship. With railways Russia
will be able to bring quickly a preponderating force to any point on her
frontier. Her officers are already good, and for money she can import the
best generals; indeed, I do not see why she should not breed them. Russia
is civilised enough to produce men of the highest military qualities.'

I asked Admiral Matthieu