There could be no question, after 1794, of demobilizing these immense armies: to so do would have been to create chaos within France. But there could equally be no question of their subsisting on French territory. So the war which had begun as one for the defence of France and her Revolution was transformed into one first of plunder and then of conquest. The Directory did not much care where the French armies went so long as they and their generals stayed abroad. The young Bonaparte led his starving and ragged forces into Italy in 1796 with a simple promise of plunder, thereby initiating a course of conquest which acquired an impetus of its own. If we ask why Napoleon’s armies were to follow him not only into Italy but to Egypt, to Germany, to Poland, and ultimately to Russia, and recognize that an increasing number of the wretched young conscripts did so because they had no alter- native and would far rather have stayed at home, we find that part of the answer lies in the prospects of loot, part in the hopes of promotion on the field—for the Napoleonic armies were most effective vehicles of social mobility—and part in a quest for adventure; all of which could be summed up in the concept of la Gloire, Glory.