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Conscripts in two rows, boots off, a white dog among them. Universal service made the nation itself the army in waiting.

France after 1870 was a country organized around a bruise. The defeat by Prussia had cost it two provinces, an emperor, and its standing assumption of being Europe's first army, and the Third Republic rebuilt its forces around universal conscription: every young man to the barracks, the nation itself as the army in waiting. The word for the mood was revanche, and it needed pictures. Édouard Detaille, star pupil of Meissonier and the most exact military painter alive, supplied the definitive one at the Salon of 1888, and the state bought it at once. Le Rêve is a bivouac at first light during the autumn maneuvers: a field of conscripts asleep in their greatcoats in two long rows, boots off, a white dog curled among them, the rifles stacked in neat tripods down the line with the furled colors laid horizontal across them. And above, in the dawn clouds, the dream, shared by the whole field as one man: the armies of the First Empire at full charge, eagles up, flags shredded gloriously, the grandfathers' wars conducting a fly-past over the grandsons. The painting's craft is all in the two registers touching: the mist of the real field rises until it becomes the smoke of the imagined one, and you cannot fix the line where the weather ends and the inheritance begins. It became the Republic's icon: engraved, chromolithographed, hung in schoolrooms and barracks, the approved image of what military service meant, sleep now, glory pending. Read from the other side of 1914, the picture changes temperature without changing a brushstroke. The boys in the greatcoats, or their sons at the same age, would get the war the dream was advertising, against machine guns the eagles knew nothing about, and the fly-past overhead becomes the most honest thing in the painting: a nation's ideas marching at altitude, out of reach of the facts. Detaille died in 1912 and was spared the comparison. The canvas hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, in the terminus hall of the railway age, where the crowds pass a sleeping army on their way to the Impressionists, and the dog, at least, sleeps untroubled by any of it.