How do you motivate a conscript? When I was in the British Army, which is volunteer only, commanding a basic training troop if someone was wanted to give up we could say to them 'if this isn't for you then you can go home' (of course we did coach and mentor people to help them, I mean in cases where people just give up and stop soldiering when an exercise gets tough). They usually worked extremely hard to get into th…
>> "What do you do if they sort of do what they're told, but not really putting any effort into it?" You transfer them to some variant of a penal battalion. Simon Murray has a good description of this (from the French Foreign Legion) in [0]. During his stint in the Legion, the generic punishment was having to run around carrying heavy rocks in a backpack that has wire straps, coupled with sleep deprivation. It sounds…
In fact in later decades its usefulness, other than the aggressiveness and expendibility of its soldiers, was based on the fact that French conscripts in the home-based Armée Métropolitan legally could not be deployed overseas.