home, the magazines of moral ammunition stored all about you, the
bomb-proofs against the shells of soul-destruction aimed at every
soldier in life, will all be torn from you, and you will be as a Knight
of the Cross, alone on the desert. Perhaps


YOU HAVE REACHED THE GREAT CITY.

Now buckle on your armor. You do not need an intrepid courage, now;
intrepid courage may have brought you here; intrepid courage is but a
holiday kind of a virtue, to be seldom exercised, as experience will
teach you. You need firmness to resist all kinds of attacks. You need
good-nature, and yet you must repel temptation with a look as black as
Erebus. You need affability, yet you must speak almost by rote, and the
opportunities to keep from speaking outnumber the exigencies in which
you must speak by ten to one. You must be tender, and yet you must be
cruel as a surgeon. Without these opposites well balanced in your
character, you will not fight the battle successfully.


NAPOLEON

won his battles by hurling ten thousand men upon two thousand. Simple,
was it not? Now you are one young soldier. You will have to find a place
in the enemy's lines which is even weaker than you before you can throw
yourself against it with success. You, therefore, cannot be too
circumspect. If the General pushes two thousand men against one
thousand, on ground that is otherwise even, he is a wise leader, but if
he finds four thousand enemies there, and if his principal attack is
hazarded in the action, he is always accounted a daring fool. Let me