Few nights pass without false alarms, without shots foolishly fired upon imaginary enemies, and without lamentable accidents.

Every night there are disputes, which often degenerate into fights, and then in the morning, when explanations take place, these very explanations are an excuse for recommencing drinking.

Rules, indeed, are not wanting to abate all this, but the misfortune is that they are never executed.
The indiscipline of the National Guard contrasts strangely with the patriotism of their words.

Most of the insubordination may be ascribed to drunkenness, but the _mauvaise tenue_ which is so apparent in too many battalions is due also to many other causes.

The primary organisation of the National Guard was ill-conceived and ill-executed, and when the enrolments had been made, and the battalions formed, day after day a fresh series of orders were promulgated, so diffuse, so obscure, and so contradictory, that the officers, despairing to make head or tail of them, gave up any attempt to enforce them." The attempt at the last hour to form marching battalions out of these citizen soldiers, by obliging each sedentary battalion to furnish 150 men, has not been a very successful one.