The high positions which he had created for them and the rich incomes which
they enjoyed had developed their and their wives' taste for a luxurious and
brilliant mode of living. Besides, most of them, as well as their master,
had attained the age between forty and fifty, their ambition gradually had
relented, they had enough; and the family with which they had been together
for very brief periods only between two campaigns, clung to them now and
held them tightly.

Notwithstanding these conditions, they all came when the Emperor called;
after they had shaken off wife and children and had mounted in the saddle,
while the old veterans and the young impatient soldiers were jubilant
around them, they regained their good humor and went on to new victories,
the brave men they always had been.

Especially at first when, at the head of their magnificent regiments, they
marched eastward through the conquered lands, from city to city, from
castle to castle, like masters of the world, when in Dresden they met their
comrades in war and their friends, and when they saw how all the crowned
heads of Europe bowed before their Emperor, then the Grand Army was in its
glory.

As we know from history the Grand Army had contingents from twenty
nationalities: Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Swiss, Spaniards,
Portuguese, Poles, Illyrians, etc., and numbered over half a million men,
with 100 thousand horses, 1,000 cannon.

According to Bleibtreu (Die grosse Armee, Stuttgart, 1908), and Kielland
(Rings um Napoleon, Leipzig, 1907) the Grand Army was made up as follows: