The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-12-07

orders as the humblest gendarme. That task
Involved in the midst of a war a quarrel with
the men of the sword. Under the Emperor
every French general has felt himself an en-
tity, parsonage, a man with o separate posi-
ton in the great club which kept the En-
peror on his throne, and has repudiated al
most in words the notion of obedience to any
civil authority whatsoever. The future his
torian of France will be able to show that
many of the disasters of this great war had
no other cause than the chickering's and
JEALoUs1Es OF THE GENERALS.
their intense sense of their individual ri yhts
and privileges. So ineradicable was this evil
| spirit, the very root of insubordination, that
even within the fortnight a French general
General Cambricis, has ventured to have and
to act on private opinion that it was beneath
his position to act wish another French gene
raj, named Garibaldi-that in fact he had, as
'regular" soldier, right to settle whom the
State should and should not accept as its
| allies. M Gambetta met this spirit in the only
way in which it can be met anywhere-by an
infiexible assertion OF the supremacyof the civil
authority, by removing general after general
without explanation or apology, by reducing
officers promoting officers, and even-in de-
fiance of all traditions since Louis Philippe
in a moment of sHbserviency, DESTROYED
France by accepting the law which abolished
the right of the State to dismiss an officer
and SO made of the army a self dependent
club-making officers until he had found the
men who were prepared to obey the State,
and who, therefore, have for the first time
stemmed the tide of French disaster. The
generals reduced to reason, there still re-
mained the greater task Of
REDUCING THE SOLDIERS TO OBEDIENCE.
The difficulties in the way were enormous.
Under the empire the officers had gradually
|
found refuge from resistance in isolation
had to use an expressive, though unjust
common phrase, become 'afraid of the men, 3"
till they hardly dared issue an unpleasant
command, till the tradition of obedience had
disappeared, while the proclamation of the re-
public had of itself destroyed the tradition of
mere Difference. Difference, at no time strong
in French army, where the private may be
the social superior of his officer, could not be
restored; but obedience might be, and it was.
Rising fullyto the height of the situation, the
stoutish Italian advocate who for the hour
represented France decreed that in this
SUPREME HOUR OF DANGER
every soldier guilty of disobedience, insubor-
dination, or pillage, should be treated as he
would be in the Prussian army-tried by
court-martial of officers only and executed
there and then. stern hint was, at the
same time, given to all general officers that
this order had no limits, and was meant to be
executed as we'll as read, if they intended to
remain in command. The new power, which
exists as an ultimate power in every army in
the world, was, therefore, relentlessly but
justly applied, and executions, said to have
exceeded one hundred in number, completely
restored order in the army of the Loire
discipline of the old and true kind, under
which soldier dare no more plunder the
peasantry without orders than he dare retreat
before the enemy without a signal.
CORES PoNDENTs RACED
and talked OF discomfort and the certainty
that D'Aurelles would be shot-as if that
mattered-but no army ever mutinied
against discipline yet; the officers recovered
their places and their confidence, the men
found once more that they were fed, and
once again, for the first time since Woerth,
1T became possible to execute manoeu-
vres, and to move men swiftly without leav-
ing one-half of them benind It had come
to this with the French army-that a march
OF ten miles day reduced it to disorgan-
lied crowd. The instrument of which the
Prussians make such use (the field telegraph
has been organized and finally, by the ap-
pointment of civil commissaries, with abso-
Lutte power of making requisitions, to accom-
pany the army, III. Gambetta has removed
THE LAST AND MOST SERIOUS DIFFICULTY
IN the way OF the lntendance, has enabled it
to levy supplies from the country, without
demoralizing the army by employing soldiers
in task which, if left to them degenerates
into unauthorized plunder. We have taken
every fact in this article from the letters of
men who are bitterly hostile to NJ Gam BETA;
who consider him foe of the army, an up
start and a lunatic; who are never tired of
shrieking for military dictator, and consider
that France is lost because her representative
''looks like bourgeois, "a remark, by the
way, which is only true so far as
1t is true of so many French and
Italian statesmen, who are apt to want
the impassiveness most Englishmen aud all
Germans of ranks are accustomed to affect
And we ask our readers deliberately whether
the man who has done all this for his coun-
try, who in two months has re-established
order In the great cities and discipline in the
armies of France, who, amidst unheard-of
disasters, has struggled against national de-
spalr, with one hand beating down anarchists
and with the other building up armies, and
who, in the very midst of a work which he
believed to be on the edge of success, halted
to accept an armistice he detested because
his beleaguered colleagues had approved it
man, that is, who has displayed the energy
OF Jacobin and the self-restraint of an Eng
lish Cabinet Minister'S a man to be SO
utterly despised? Our prayer is that when
England's hour of danger shall arrive, we
also may find such man, with the one addi-
tional quality of silence.