The French army produced by the Revolution, and led by such men as Dugommier, Hoche, Moreau, and Bonaparte, was trained to operate in column, to deploy quickly into line, and generally to act with celerity; while the impoverished treasury of the republic compelled its armies to live entirely upon the country in which they were operating, as the only alternative to starvation. This entailed serious hardships to the soldiers, and great distress to the population of the country in which they were acting, but it marked distinctly the beginning of a new system of supply, which contributed greatly to the rapid movement of armies. The French army, at the beginning of the century, contained no regiments, but was organized into demi-brigades, each of which consisted of four battalions, each comprising ten companies, two of which were trained to act as skirmishers. These demi-brigades, with one or more batteries of artillery, constituted a division, to which a small force of cavalry was generally added. In 1805 Napoleon, then the supreme ruler of France, made important changes in the organization of the army. The demi-brigade was replaced by the two battalion regiments, each regiment now consisting of eight companies. Two regiments formed a brigade, and two brigades and a regiment of light infantry constituted a division. On the light regiment devolved the duties of skirmishers; namely, to harass and develop the enemy before the main attack. The divisions were grouped into larger organizations known as _corps d’armée_, or army corps, each of which consisted of all arms of the service, and was, in fact, a force capable of operating independently as a small army.[2] A corps of reserve cavalry was also formed. In numbers the cavalry was equal to one fourth, and the artillery one eighth of the strength of the infantry. The infantry was armed with a smooth-bore, muzzle-loading, flint-lock musket, which required some thirty-two distinct motions in loading, and which had an effective range of only two hundred yards, though by giving it a high elevation it could do some damage at twice that distance. This weapon bore about the same relation to the magazine rifle of the present day that the old-fashioned sickle bears to the modern mowing-machine. The artillery consisted of muzzle-loading, smooth-bore guns, which had less than one fourth the range of the modern infantry rifle. Cavalry, being able to form with comparative impunity within close proximity of the opposing infantry, could sweep down upon it in a headlong charge; and the use of the sabre on the field of battle, now so rare, was then an almost invariable feature of every conflict. Under Napoleon the armies continued to “live on the country,” but magazines of supplies were carefully prepared to supplement the exhausted resources of the theatre of war. [2] Brigades and divisions had long existed, but the army corps was a creation of Napoleon.