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sisters to support, in order to render the measure more politically tolerable. By this means, it was possible to make use of the human potential available in the country without arousing the kind of opposition that would have greeted universal conscription. In Wellington's army, therefore, the Dutch-Belgian, Hanoverian, and Nassauer contingents consisted in part of regular army regiments and in part of militia regiments; only the British contingent was entirely composed of regular soldiers, because in Great Britain constitutional guarantees blocked the use of the militia outside the kingdom.
    The difference between troops of the line and militia presented, in terms of effectiveness, the greatest discrepancy on the battlefield at Waterloo. Cobbled together and improperly trained, militia units, even though commanded by professional officers and noncommissioned officers, inevitably possessed a level of preparation and moral cohesion inferior to that of regular troops. This discrepancy was perhaps less marked among the Prussians, owing to the strong national spirit that animated a large part of their Landwehr, but it was particularly evident in the other continental armies; and it was one of the reasons why the Duke of Wellington, assessing the army that had been placed under his orders, had judged it "an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped." The quality of his troops explains why Wellington had been obliged to establish and defend his line, while Napoleon, with the more professional army, had pursued him defiantly the day before and would attack him relentlessly on the eighteenth.

FIVE
     

    THE BRITISH ARMY:
     
    "THE SCUM OF THE EARTH"
     
    T he fact that the British army was composed entirely of professional military men carries none of the elite implications that the expression may suggest to the modern reader. The soldierly profession, badly paid and subject to the harshest discipline, was not greatly appreciated in the United Kingdom—was, in fact, a decidedly proletarian vocation. It was no accident that a high percentage of those who enlisted were Irish, since Ireland, overpopulated as it was with a deeply impoverished peasantry, had always been the major provider of cannon fodder to His Majesty's armies; except for a few Scots regiments whose recruiting had been notably regional, Irish soldiers generally made up between 20 percent and 40 percent of the infantry battalions that Wellington marshaled at Waterloo.
    Furthermore, in the course of the Napoleonic Wars, the British army, desperately short of men, had been obliged to avail itself of the reservoir of recruits constituted by the militia: Men chosen by lot in local drawings to join the territorial regiments were strongly pressured to sign up for the regular army after completing their training; hence, in many regiments at Waterloo, more than half of the men had enlisted after some experience in the militia. These recruits likely produced a statistical rise in the average level of education and social class among the troops, which by then included some decently educated, lower-middle-class young men whose ineluctable fate it was to become noncommissioned officers; to such men we owe the relatively few letters or diaries written by enlisted men, as opposed to officers, in Wellington's army.
    The vast majority of soldiers still came from the ranks of the otherwise unemployed, men who had not found another way to earn a living. The few available statistics show that around half of the troops had been farm laborers and the rest textile workers or apprentice tradesmen. In such a class-conscious society as England's, the proletarian origins of the troops opened a chasm between them and their officers; one day the Duke of Wellington, a man devoid of democratic feelings and little given to mincing his words, said that the English army was recruited from among "the scum of the earth."
    His enemies shared this uncharitable judgment. Years later, when French veterans