NAPOLEON'S UNPAID SOLDIERS.

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXVII, Issue 178, 3 August 1904, Page 4

NAPOLEON'S UNPAID SOLDIERS.

"Le Solda.t Imperial " is a book in French by Jean Morvan, who, says The Times, makes elaborate enquiry into the condition of the common French soldier nnder the First Em pire.

The zenith of French military asceodenoy was reached in the Austerlitz campaign, says The Times in its notice of M. Morvan's work. After wards decline set in. Immediately after the neace of Amiens Bonaparte wrote to Ihe Minister of War to point nut that it was essential not only to pay the troops, but to pay them punctually. Unlike most of the First Consul's injunctions, this exhortation was more honored in the breach than in the observance. As early as May, 1805, the sailors' pay was five months in arrears, and in 1806 the arrears due to the troops who were quartered in France amounted to no less than 15,000,000 francs. "In not paying the Orand Army my sole aim i« to prevent the soldier from spending his money in foreign countries." This statement is very properly characterised by M. Morvanas'*a miserable lie," for on the very same day the Emperor wrote to Bertbier ordering him to pay the officers, if he bad any money at his dia posal. Death came to the aid of the Emperor, and removed thousands of his bumble creditors, yet even so the survivors found no protection against delay and fraud. At Tilsit six mom hs' pay was owing to the troops; and when ultimately pay day came the victors of Jena and Priedland were compelled to receive part of the reward in coin which had dt preciated 40 per cent. Nor was this the sole occasion on which the most imperious of debts was disgracefully repudiated. One-tenth of the wages of the Spanish army was paid in copper; the army of Portugal for the most part went unpaid, and the men who had faced the fires of Scno tensk and the slaughter of Borodino were put off with discredited Russian paper* According to a calculation fashionable with the military theorists of the Empire, an invading army could be supported by a country if it* num bers did not exceed a tenth p*rt of the subject population. The theory worked out well enough in Germany, where for the roost part the F<eooh troops lived in plenty, to the infinite annoyance and loss of the inhabitants. But applied to th« dry, wind-swept op lands of central Spain, withtheir diffl cult roads, tb^ir impracticable rivers, their sober, abstemious population, it was little shorn of lunacy.

The following appeared in ovr second edition last issue .-—