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Updated: April 30, 2025
Piotr Sidorov starts, crosses himself, and goes into a little room with a glass door, where the conscripts undress. A comrade of Piotr Sidorov's, who has just been passed for service, and come naked out of the revision office, is dressing hurriedly, his teeth chattering. Sidorov has already heard the news, and can see from his face too that he has been taken.
We shall have to push up roads, railways, supplies; the bringing up of the heavy guns will take time, but less time than they think! Our men are in the pink of condition!" On which again follows very high praise of the quality of the men now coming out under the Military Service Act. "Yet they are conscripts," says one of us, in some surprise, "and the rest were volunteers." "No doubt.
He was an energetic officer and accomplished his work rapidly. Forrest was in his front, but with neither his old-time army nor his old-time prestige. He now had principally conscripts. His conscripts were generally old men and boys. He had a few thousand regular cavalry left, but not enough to even retard materially the progress of Wilson's cavalry.
A battle lost would have dispelled all the dreams of his imagination, and with them would have vanished all his immense schemes for the future of France. He saw the danger, but was not intimidated by it; and trusting to his accustomed good fortune, and to the courage and fidelity of his troops, he said, "I have, it is true, many conscripts in my army, but they are Frenchmen.
When, on February 3rd, Napoleon entered Troyes, scarcely a single vivat was heard. Even the old troops were cast down by defeat and hunger, while as many as 6,000 conscripts are said to have deserted. The inhabitants refused to supply the necessaries of life except upon requisition. "The army is perishing of famine," writes the Emperor at Troyes.
"If I have any knowledge of phiz what d'ye call it," observed O'Brien, after she left us, "there is honesty in that woman, and I must trust her, but not yet; we must wait till the conscripts have gone." I agreed with O'Brien, and we remained talking until an hour afterwards, when the woman brought us our dinner. "What is your name?" inquired O'Brien.
The conscripts had by this time got over their home-sickness, and had caught the martial enthusiasm of their older comrades. All believed that the Grande Armée would be invincible, and fears were even expressed that the Russians would not venture to stand against them. Some of the older men, however, assured them that there was little chance of this.
But he had not done so, and there was nothing wonderful or unusual in this; for on all occasions of the kind many of the conscripts had to be sought out, and brought forth from the bosoms of their families, to which they retired, with a bashful diffidence as to their own peculiar fitness for martial glory.
On the eighth of January, a huge placard was posted on the town-hall, stating that the Emperor would levy, after a senatus-consultus, as they said in those days, in the first place, one hundred and fifty thousand conscripts of 1813; then one hundred cohortes of the first call of 1812 who thought they had already escaped; then one hundred thousand conscripts of from 1809 to 1812, and so on to the end; so that every loop-hole was closed, and we would have a larger army than before the Russian expedition.
On his side, the First Consul, shocked by such bad faith, and not wishing to be a dupe, openly prepared for war, and ordered the filling up of the ranks, and a new levy of one hundred and twenty thousand conscripts. War was officially declared in June, but hostilities had already begun before this time.
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