376                 MODERN CIVILIZATIOX

to be a soldier; sometimes a gentleman was condemned
to serve as a soldier,1 in punishment for a crime.

Soon the governments eotild not find enough men
to recruit the armies. From the end of the seventeenth
century they tried to procure them, as they procured
their money, by compulsory levies. The King of Swe-
den, Gustavus Adolphus, had already imposed upon
his subjects the obligation to serve in his army. Sev-
eral states organized a compulsory service in the eigh-
teenth century. Louis XIV., near the end of his reign,
created a militia service, which was continued down to
the Revolution; every year, in each parish, they drew
lots as to who should go into the army, but it was
only the poor people who drew; the bourgeois, their
domestics and the rich peasants were exempt.

The Armament—At the time of the Thirty Years'
War there still remained in the armies bodies of
mounted men clothed in iron armor and carrying
lances, just as in the Middle Ages; these men at arms
had fought at Rocroy. But the cavalry was composed
of an entirely new body; the cuirassiers, who still
wore the cuirass; the carbineers; the dragoons, who
were only foot soldiers mounted on horseback; the
hussars, dressed in Turkish fashion and mounted on
swift horses. Their arms were a sword and firearms,
especially the long pistol, which has retained the name
of cavalry pistol. After the Thirty Years' War the
corps clothed in full armor were abandoned.

Neither did the old infantry survive this war. The
corps of foot soldiers was composed of two kinds of

1 Such was still only a few years ago the organization, dis-
cipline and kind of life in the armies of Russia.