The secret, my friend said, of keeping order and discipline in a regiment without getting oneself disliked was to refrain from exerting more authority than was strictly necessary. One must not be always on the look-out for faults. Officers made a mistake in seeing everything at all times; there are moments when, as Nelson found, the blind eye was convenient. A Frenchman is not naturally inclined towards discipline; the quicker his intelligence, the more likely he is to feel resentment at clumsy authority. The peasant, slower to think and to take offence, is more amenable. He gives up his will and individuality with greater readiness to the leader, and even courts direction. But in the veins of every Frenchman is some trace of the _frondeur_ and revolutionary. His mind is impatient of restraint and leaps readily to conclusions and, sometimes, to tragic resolutions. Mere authority, as authority, chafes him; he dislikes it in the abstract. To render it acceptable, there must be an idea behind it. If you want to lead him, you must be prepared to undertake gladly the same risks as he, to go out and meet them with a gay insouciance. You must show him that you do not count your life more valuable than his, or shelter yourself behind your position. You must lead him by going in front, not by driving him from behind. It is an age of miracles; astounding things may happen; notwithstanding his nonchalance and objection to play the hero, at the moment of action he becomes transformed. You have only to know how to draw him out, to find the formula which unlocks his heart, to discover the hidden springs of his emotion. For an idea, it has been said, he is ever ready to shoulder a rifle behind a barricade. And when that idea is the country, with patriotism leaping high, his _frondeur_ spirit is capable of all. Centuries have not dimmed its ardent inflammability, and each successive phase in history renews his high susceptibility, until one feels that the Great War, instead of exhausting the fruitful soil of France, has enriched it with new virtues and a new potentiality. Rifles have spoken again from the barricades, but this time the nation is ranged on one side of it and the invader on the other. Patriotism and ideality flow perennially from the mountains of Latin youth, ready to be diverted to any holy cause.