The conscript, coming to the colours on the first of October, is usually given the choice of the arm of service in which he will do his two years' training. The subject of this chapter has elected to serve in the infantry of the line. He may have just completed an expensive education, or he may have come from Montmartre, the slums of a provincial town, the _landes_ of Brittany, or a village of French Lorraine; in civilian life he may have been a peasant, a street arab, a student of philosophy, a future president of the Republic--it is all the same on that first of October, for now he is simply a conscript with two years' military training before him, and a halfpenny a day for his pay, together with a periodical allowance of tobacco, which is one of the luxuries that the French Army allows to its soldiers.
Arrived at his station the conscript finds his room, and is allotted a bed therein. He finds himself placed under a corporal who will teach him all about his rifle, manifest an interest in the cleanliness of his linen, see that he gets his hair cut, instruct him in drill, turn him out of bed in the morning, and see that he is in, or accounted for, when the roll is called at night. The first business of the conscript is to get fitted out from the store in which the battalion keeps clothes for its men. Here he gets his boots, his parade uniform, and his fatigue outfit. His captain, with the assistance of the master tailor, passes the outfit as complete and correct, and the conscript says good-bye to civilian attire for a period of two years. There was one youngster, a Breton youth, who mourned for a week or two after coming to the colours, because the cow at home would not take its food from other people as it would from him; there are many who remember how they used to milk the goats, and these make humorous little tragedies for a time, for their fellow conscripts.
Like the British infantryman, the conscript is concerned principally in learning to march and shoot, and use his bayonet. In the matter of marching, to which reference has already been made, the training of the conscript is a complicated business. No walking that he has ever done as a civilian bears any relation to this curious half-shuffling trot, unless by chance he is a native of the Vosges country, and in that case he may recall a rapid climb up some steep hill, to which this business of the march is more nearly akin than to anything else. Perhaps he does not take kindly to his work at first, but, in addition to the corporal under whose charge he is placed, there are the men who sleep on either side of him to inculcate in him the first principles of discipline, for there is nothing on earth half so comforting to the man placed under a system as to be able to give advice to a new-comer to the system and its disabilities.