Because of these checks, as well as to give more air and comfort to the men, in all arms of the service intervals are maintained on the march, and a column is divided up into as many separate units as possible. Infantry maintain intervals between companies, cavalry maintain intervals between squadrons, and artillery maintain intervals between batteries, while the two mounted arms split up their columns if parallel roads are available, for the intervals do not quite compensate for the checks described, and, the smaller the units of the force can be made by means of separate roads, the shorter will be the march between two points. CHAPTER IX MANOEUVRES Manoeuvres form an expensive portion of the conscript's training, and it will be understood, when it is remembered that under ordinary peace conditions France maintains twenty military stations, each forming the skeleton of an army corps, that the annual cost to the state runs into a considerable fraction of the total military expenditure, this including the cost of food for men, forage for horses, the running of transports and stores, and all the expenses incidental to the maintenance of troops in the field. One item alone, the cost of shells fired by artillery during their annual practice, represent a large expenditure, for each shell is in itself a complicated piece of machinery, which must be perfectly accurate in all its parts, and is a costly thing to produce. Not that the soldier on manoeuvres ever counts cost; the majority of the troops do not even think of such a thing. They are out roughing it, a business which gratifies the instincts of most healthy minded and bodied men, and one which is conducive to health and high spirits. Your conscript on manoeuvres is a different being from the one who came to the colours in the previous October. He has acquired a self-confidence and self-reliance of which he was innocent at the beginning of his training; he came as a boy, but now there are about him the signs of a man, and the first camp more than anything else gives him a realisation of the value of military training from a man's own point of view, and quite apart from its value to the state. By the time the season of manoeuvres is over he is a second-year man, and has begun to feel his feet.