Military life in Italy : sketches - Societa italiana di storia militare

43** MILITARY LIFE.
and resigned themselves to it as a salutary necessity. Besides
this, that domesticity, that fraternizing which springs up and
increases so rapidly between the officers and soldiers in the
occasion of great perils or common misfortunes, had made the
most obtuse and malevolent understand that if, in the connections
of ordinary life, there is a rigorous and unalterable division,
that does not arise from a spontaneous desire on the part
of the officer, but from custom, from a general rule dictated
by the need of discipline and recognized by all as necessary,
either from intuition or experience. This being fully understood,
there naturally disappeared all those grudges and
rancors generally felt by quarrelsome soldiers against the
austere and inexorable officers, an ill
feeling which, for
the most part, is
produced by a false amour propre, and
which diffidence and timidity only increase ;
and they did disappear
in fact. In the face of that continual spectacle of
misfortune, in the midst of that solemn unanimity of affection
and good-will, every one understood quite
clearly how petty
and selfish his personal hates and resentments were, and felt
them disappear from his heart of their own accord without
his being obliged to fight them. Besides this, the operations
of the officers and soldiers had been for a long time of
such a nature, that the orders of the superiors mingled, not
only in substance, but also in form, with the most simple precepts
of religion, taught by mothers to their young children.
Certain talks which the officers had with the soldiers might be
repeated word for word by a sacred orator on parchment, and
certain orders for the day by the colonels were taken purely
from the Gospel. Therefore, it was not possible
that even
the most ignorant and stupid soldiers could rebel at the