This mention of canteen songs recalls the fact that the French infantryman beguiles the tedium of route-marching by songs, interminably long songs which go on and on for miles; in recalling what the next verse will be, a man forgets the number of miles between him and the end of the march, or he thinks he may be able to, which amounts to very nearly the same thing. They still sing songs that were in vogue at the time of Fontenoy, as they march at ease along the endless straight roads of the country, with their rifles slung anyhow and their formations broken up that friend may march with friend. This is when marching "at ease" only, for let a column of marching infantrymen come to the streets of a town, and they immediately stiffen up to show themselves at their best before the girls at the windows. The Army of the Republic is a part of the nation, but the women of the nation manifest no less interest in it for the fact that their fathers and brothers have served. There is something in the sound of a military band and the sight of a column of uniformed men that will always bring faces to the windows of a French house. "So our Jacques is perhaps marching somewhere," they say, or--"Thus we marched to relieve Bazaine," will remark a veteran of the '70 campaign, feeling the while that these men may yet make of "'70" a thing no longer to remember in connection with lost provinces. And, once the town or village street is left behind, and the road stretches unbroken before the column, the men begin to sing again, and their officers smile at the song--they are too wise, in the French Army, to suppress the singing and the cigarette smoking, and thus the men march well. As well, certainly, as any infantry in the world, and probably better than most. Although it is a conscript army, there are regimental traditions, as in the British or in any other service. Your conscript in his second year of service will tell how his regiment captured the colours here, or saved the position there, in the way-back days, and is nearly as proud of it as if he, instead of the fellow soldiers of his great-grandfather, were concerned in the business. _Esprit de corps_, though now a common phrase in connection with the British Army, was first of all a French idiom--and is yet, and an untranslatable one too--designed to express the French soldier's pride in his own unit of the service, or in his own branch of the service. At the present time, it has as much application to the French Army as in the day when the phrase was coined; pride in his own powers of endurance, and pride in the unit in which he serves, still characterise the French conscript, and in the last ten years or so this feeling has grown to such an extent as to place the French Army, although a conscript organisation, on a level with a voluntary force. CHAPTER VI CAVALRY