There is a long-standing military tradition that if you take people who ought to be one thing and make them into something else, they should be twice as good at it as those folks who were already that other thing. The most famous examples are of course the Janissaries, Christian children taken between the ages of 10 and 12 and transformed over a period of years into elite Ottoman troops. The other most famous example being Bucky Barnes, who started off as Captain America's sidekick until... well, you know the rest.

Clearly Voltaire is unaware of this sound thread of military reasoning.

- Count Dolby von Luckner