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Updated: May 1, 2025
And if the plan of campaign that he had dreamed of was clear and precise, its manner of execution was most lame and impotent, a fact of which he was to learn a great deal more later on and of which he had then only a faint and glimmering perception: the seven army corps dispersed along the extended frontier line en echelon, from Metz to Bitche and from Bitche to Belfort; the many regiments and squadrons that had been recruited up to only half-strength or less, so that the four hundred and thirty thousand men on paper melted away to two hundred and thirty thousand at the outside; the jealousies among the generals, each of whom thought only of securing for himself a marshal's baton, and gave no care to supporting his neighbor; the frightful lack of foresight, mobilization and concentration being carried on simultaneously in order to gain time, a process that resulted in confusion worse confounded; a system, in a word, of dry rot and slow paralysis, which, commencing with the head, with the Emperor himself, shattered in health and lacking in promptness of decision, could not fail ultimately to communicate itself to the whole army, disorganizing it and annihilating its efficiency, leading it into disaster from which it had not the means of extricating itself.
Luncheon consisted of one biscuit on three days a week, nut-food on Thursdays, bits of blubber, from which most of the oil had been extracted for the lamps, on two days a week, and nothing on the remaining day. On this day breakfast consisted of a half-strength sledging ration. Supper was almost invariably seal and penguin, cut up very finely and fried with a little seal blubber.
But to-day, even with interstate shipments of liquors to consumers, a gallon of "blockade" will be watered to half-strength, then fortified with cologne spirits or other abominations, and peddled out by bootleggers, at $1.50 a quart, in villages and lumber camps where somebody always is thirsty and can find the coin to assuage it.
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