Doctor Wasserthur notes in his report of June I 0, 1 884, on the condition of the Selestat hospital, in which diseased soldiers and warwounded sleep alongside typhus cases, cancer patients and the destitute.
The social demands of the military proletariat will long remain the simple, vital requirements of subsistence: salaries, job security, on-the-job assistance to invalids and the wounded. Riots and mutinies take the form of frequent strikes, which are narrow in scope and generally concern delayed payment of wages-delays of up to ten years. The mutineers often form autonomous combat groups, electing a chief (Spanish Electo, German ambosat, etc.) who is assisted by a democratic council. And im�ediately these proletarian troops return to their initial demands. They try to take over and hold a fortification, to the point where their employers are finally obliged to concede, to pay what they owe so that the soldiers will get back on the highway. These limited revolts will nonetheless play an important role in the political evolution. For the satisfaction of the soldiers' demands helps, within the state apparatus, to hasten the development of the laboring and productive populations' material obligation toward those "luxury peoples" who supplant the old provincial masters. Tax, that economic vassalage, is sometimes levied directly by the soldiers, "an expedient means, disapproved of by Colbert who advises the collectors (as they then called those terrible animals) to use violence only as a last resort. " Thus, the public treasury is able to maintain a standing army more decently, to counter frequent desertions by guaranteeing regular salaries. In this mitigated period, as Clausewitz shows, the military objective is accomplished with dificulty using money from the treasury. The vagabond troops are taken wherever they can be found, from one's own home or from the neighbor's, with no care for their past or their origins. Many able men at that time have no choice but to live as raiders, even as brigands, holding the countryside: "couriers riding onward, owing nothing while they are on the fields."
The Bearding of Metabolic Vehicles
I 1 03