If the myth of the soldier-citizen was struck an immense blow by the sheer scale of the human destruction that resulted from the Great War, remnants of it survived into the post-war world to re-emerge in moments of national crisis. But these were usually desperate, transient phases when France faced the threat of invasion or the republic itself was under threat. In years of peace, or while the French government was screwing up its courage to cope with Hitler or respond to the civil war in Spain, there was little reference to republican tradition, no appeal to the citizen-soldier of republican legend. Conscription had been turned into a chore, a source of fear and resentment; it seemed inconceivable that young men would again march joyfully off to war as they had done in 1914. For the post-war generation the reality of modern warfare was too well known, the evidence of its destructiveness there to be studied on the street corners of every city, on the plinths of the now-ubiquitous war memorials, and in the sanatoria of the 1920s. Besides, the character of warfare had changed too drastically, far more even than during the colonial wars of the 1870 and 1880s which had already driven a wedge between past and present. It had become a prey to mechanisation – the phrase used by the Marquis de Vogüé in 1889 when commenting on the manner in which the army was presented at the exhibition to mark the centenary of the Revolution – and the central role of flesh and sinew had given way to a brave new world of matériel, of hardware and technology.