Our projected organization will give us four hundred thousand good soldiers. But all our reserves will be without cohesion, if they are thrown into this or that organization on the eve of battle. At a distance, numbers of troops without cohesion may be impressive, but close up they are reduced to fifty or twenty-five per cent. who really fight. Wagram was not too well executed. It illustrated desperate efforts that had for once a moral effect on an impressionable enemy. But for once only. Would they succeed again? The Cimbrians gave an example [37] and man has not changed. Who to-day is braver than they were? And they did not have to face artillery, nor rifles. Originally Napoleon found as an instrument, an army with good battle methods, and in his best battles, combat followed these methods. He himself prescribed, at least so they say, for he misrepresented at Saint Helena, the methods used at Wagram, at Eylau, at Waterloo, and engaged enormous masses of infantry which did not give material effect. But it involved a frightful loss of men and a disorder that, after they had once been unleashed, did not permit of the rallying and reemployment that day of the troops engaged. This was a barbaric method, according to the Romans, amateurish, if we may say such a thing of such a man; a method which could not be used against experienced and well trained troops such as d'Erlon's corps at Waterloo. It proved disastrous. Napoleon looked only at the result to be attained. When his impatience, or perhaps the lack of experience and knowledge in his officers and soldiers, forbade his continued use of real attack tactics, he completely sacrificed the material effect of infantry and even that of cavalry to the moral effect of masses. The personnel of his armies was too changing. In ancient battle victory cost much less than with modern armies, and the same soldiers remained longer in ranks. At the end of his campaigns, when he had soldiers sixty years old, Alexander had lost only seven hundred men by the sword. Napoleon's system is more practicable with the Russians, who naturally group together, mass up, but it is not the most effective. Note the mass formation at Inkermann. [38] What did Napoleon I do? He reduced the role of man in battle, and depended instead on formed masses. We have not such magnificent material. Infantry and cavalry masses showed, toward the end of the Empire, a tactical degeneracy resulting from the wearing down of their elements and the consequent lowering of standards of morale and training. But since the allies had recognized and adopted our methods, Napoleon really had a reason for trying something so old that it was new to secure that surprise which will give victory once. It can give victory only once however, tried again surprise will be lacking. This was sort of a desperate method which Napoleon's supremacy allowed him to adopt when he saw his prestige waning.