moral courage, they cannot stand
ridicule, they cannot encounter disapprobation, they bow before
oppression; a French soldier condemned by a court-martial cries for mercy
like a child. The same man in battle appears indifferent to death. The
Spaniard runs away without shame, but submits to death when it is
inevitable without terror. None of the prisoners taken on either side in
the Spanish civil war asked for pardon.'

'Indifference to life,' I said, 'and indifference to danger have little
in common. General Fenelon told me that in Algeria he had more than once
to preside at an execution. No Arab showed any fear. Once there were two
men, one of whom was to be flogged, the other to be shot. A mistake was
made and they were going to shoot the wrong man. It was found out in
time, but neither of the men seemed to care about it; yet they
would probably have run away in battle. The Chinese are not brave, but
you can hire a man to be beheaded in your place.'

'So,' said Ampere, 'you could always hire a substitute in our most
murderous wars, when in the course of a year a regiment was killed twice
over. It was hiring a man, not indeed to be beheaded, but to be shot for
you.'

'The destructiveness,' said Beaumont, 'of a war is only gradually known.
It is found out soonest in the villages when the deaths of the conscripts
are heard of, or are suspected from their never returning; but in the
towns, from which the substitutes chiefly come, it may be long
undiscovered. Nothing is known but what is officially published, and the
Government lies with an audacity which seems always to succeed. If it
stated the loss of men in a battle at one half of the real number, people
would fancy that it ought to be doubled, and so come near to the truth;
but it avows only one-tenth or only one-twentieth, and then the amount of
falsehood is underestimated.'

'Marshal Randon,' I said, 'told me that the whole loss in the Italian
campaign was under 7,000 men.'

'That is a good instance,' said Beaumont. 'It certainly was 50,000,
perhaps 70,000. But I am guilty of a _delit_ in saying so, and you will
be guilty of a _delit_ if you repeat what I have said. I remember the
case of a man in a barber's shop in Tours, to whom the barber said that
the harvest was bad. He repeated the information, and was punished by
fine and imprisonment for having spread _des nouvelles alarmantes_. Truth
is no excuse; in fact it is an aggravation, for the truer the news th