FRENCH MILITARY GLORY.
OUR neighbours seem more than half-ashamed of the last exploit of their African heroes. If the story. ef the Kabyles of Debra,
smoked in their caves like bees in a hive, open their eyes to the real character of warlike glory,. it will be a blessing for themselves and humanity at large. There is much in the modern history of France to palliate the national craze for feats of arms. The proclamation of the Duke of Brunswick in the early period of the Revolution justified an intense burst of national indignation ;. and the re. peated triumphs of armies composed almost exclusively of pri- vate soldiers and raw levies commanded for the most part by im- promptu officers, over the veterans of all Europe commanded by the most experienced generalsof Germany and Italy aided by the
renegade generals of were intoxicating stimulants. The aggressions of the Empire—not always unprovoked—were the natural consequence of such a state of mind ; and the reverses of the Peninsula and Russia, the defeat at Leipsic, and the invasion and conquest of France, were less calculated to disgust a high- spirited people with war than to inspire them with yearnings to reassert their lost ascendancy. At the bottom of French aggres- sions there lurks this chivalrous spirit—they fight for honour, not for hatred or plunder. But the indulgence of a sentiment, how- ever specious, at the expense of the peace and happiness of =- offending neighbours, is a crime. No neighbouring nation seeks
to injure France; neighbouring nation presumes or affects to look down upon 7rance. French complaints of English aggres- sions are desperate attempts at self-delusion, to efface their com- punctious visitings before troubling the peace of the world to efface the recollection of Waterloo. We read of heroes cured of the intemperate thirst for military glory by walking over a de- serted battle-field. The grottoes of -Dahra, with their thousand corpses, babes at the mother's breasts among the number— writhed and contorted into every variety of agonized expression— the unclean birds pouncing into the recesses of the caverns and bearing off the gobbets of roasted human flesh—will haunt the dreams of the Parisian yelpers for war, and be to them what the day after the battle has before now been to the young and thoughtless warrior.
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