THE GERMAN MILITARY SYSTEM
Military authorities agree that the German army organization surpasses
all others. The present European war is the test that has demonstrated
this fact. German national standards and American national standards
are as far apart as the poles. The Prussian government scorns all
democratic ideals and militarism pervades every cranny of the social
structure. Notwithstanding these conditions, as we are searching for an
ideal military system, we cannot afford to overlook the best the war
has developed.
All who have given the subject any study have a general idea of the
military demands made upon the German citizen. It may be well, however,
to insert an epitome of the scheme in order to analyze it.
In Germany, military service is universal and compulsory, but before
the present war there were many exemptions from duty with the colors.
On his seventeenth birthday the young German was liable for the call,
but actual military work never began until he reached his twentieth
year. At forty-five his service ceased.
During these twenty-five years of liability for duty, the German
compasses the entire gamut of military instruction. For seven years
he trains with the first line, active, or what is commonly known as
the standing army. The initial two years are spent in the ranks, where
the recruit is grounded in every detail of the duties of the soldier.
The instruction is imparted with a thoroughness equaled in no other
army. There have been, also, undoubted cases of unnecessary severity.
These are not the outcome of the system, but one of its evils, and form
the exception rather than the rule. While the instruction is imparted
with unusual strictness, it is policy to be just and, from the point
of view of the German who has passed his whole life under restraint,
the character of discipline employed is nothing extraordinary. From
the strictly professional point of view the means are justified by the
results. Frederick the Great himself could find few flaws in the German
active army.
As the seeds of American military training were planted by a German,
one who had served on the staff of Frederick the Great, we have a
parallel by which we can gain some idea of the German period of
instruction. The German system works along the same lines as those
pursued in the Regular Army in the United States, with this exception:
in the United States the recruit is encouraged to do some of his own
thinking; in Germany he is never expected to think. In Germany the
instruction is given under the strictest conditions conceivable. Once
the soldier joins his company, he is assigned a number and his bed
in barracks and thereafter he becomes as a cog in a great machine.
While the preliminary training follows the accepted lines, it is more
thorough and more exacting than the course of instruction in any other
army. In addition to his marching, drilling and purely military work,
the soldier does all the manual labor about the barracks. Of course,
the soldiers do their own cooking and tailoring, they also perform all
the “domestic” service of the barracks and the many demands incident
to the upkeep of a large army post. The routine of the day begins with
the cleaning-up of quarters and an inspection. Then the drilling is
taken up and continued practically without break until noon. Various
instruction will be undertaken in the afternoons, its character
depending upon the season of the year. More time is spent on actual
individual instruction than in any other army, and no man is graduated
out of the awkward squad until he is perfect in the details of his work.
The soldier is under absolute restraint while in barracks and he can
only leave his quarters with permission. His amusements and pleasures
are limited and, of course, he must wear his uniform on all occasions.
The German passes through the ordinary instruction of squad, section,
company and battalion during his first year service and as soon as the
period for Grand Maneuvers arrives he is supposed to be well enough
instructed to carry his pack and perform the trying test of that time
without breaking down. These maneuvers take place during the summer
at some of the various grounds scattered over Germany. The Kaiser
maneuvers, when the whole of Germany’s fighting strength is assembled,
are the climax of the German soldiers’ career.
During his instruction period the German recruit finds that he is
happier if he performs his many duties letter perfect. And it goes
much better with him if he fits himself in with the system and its
prejudices. While he is in the army, his spirit is being moulded to
ideals that are the foundation of the German Empire.
Following the two-year period, when all is subordinated to military
training and the German citizen gives his complete time and thought
to the army, he passes into the reserve for five years, where he still
belongs to his corps and is obliged to join it twice for two terms of
training, limited by law to eight weeks. In custom these periods seldom
lasted more than a month or six weeks. The length of service in the
cavalry and artillery is somewhat longer.
The next stage of the German’s military life is passed with the first
“Ban” of the second line army or _Landwehr_. Liability for this duty
lasts five years. During these years the _Landwehr_ men are called out
twice for war maneuvers, serving from eight to fourteen days on each
occasion. This ends his active military instruction. The German citizen
is assigned to the second Ban of the _Landwehr_ until he has completed
his thirty-ninth year, where no special training is required.
The _Landsturm_ is the final stage of the German’s military life.
This organization is nominally a home guard of all men from forty
to forty-five years of age who have passed through the prescribed
course of training in the army. Besides these men, the enrolment of
the _Landsturm_ includes the untrained subjects of the Kaiser between
thirty-nine and forty-five. Properly, this elderly contingent is the
second division of the home guard. The first division takes in all the
citizens of the Empire between the ages of seventeen and thirty-nine
who, for one reason or another, received no military training.
Enrolling such units in the _Landsturm_ keeps before all citizens
the fact of duty for defense of the Fatherland. There are many ways
in which a citizen may serve his country besides fighting in the
front-line trenches.
Other categories of reserves are organized, the most important being
the _Ersatz_, which is composed of young men about twenty years old
physically and mentally fit for service, but in excess of the numbers
normally needed to complete the peace time strength of the standing
army. The _Ersatz_, undergoes three terms of training of ten, six and
four weeks respectively. When the German army mobilized in July, 1914,
many of the youths volunteered for duty with the colors, while the rest
were mustered into service with fully trained reserves. A part of the
_Ersatz_ is assigned non-combatant duties.
Leaving out of consideration the demands of present war conditions,
Germany with a population of over 66,000,000 had over 1,000,000
citizens present themselves for service each year. About fifty per
cent were rejected on various counts. Of the remainder, 250,000 were
actually drafted for duty with the colors.
That a man is rejected does not mean that he is entirely unfitted for
military duty. In the German service, of all who presented themselves,
only the best are chosen. (I refer, of course, to conditions before the
present war.) It has been found that in the scheme of the organization
of the German army, 250,000 recruits are all that can be effectively
handled each year, so a selection is made out of all who present
themselves under the yearly call, and the rest are excused. Of the
number actually rejected as unfit, a large proportion belong to the
class defective in eyesight.
Scrutinizing this program of military work, we see that the economic
life of the ordinary citizen is actually interrupted during a two-year
period. The secondary training terms are actually vacations for the
hard-working German. The whole business and industrial life of the
Empire is organized to meet the demands of these interruptions. Notice
is always given in good time when the reserves of the active army are
to be called for their supplementary period of service, and the large
and small industrial organizations throughout the Empire take the
necessary measures to adjust themselves to the loss of time involved.
It has been found in practice that the actual working efficiency of an
employee is improved by these short absences from work.
When the German citizen has passed into the _Landwehr_ and the
_Landsturm_, the short periods of training required of him have no
appreciable effect upon the economical life of the Empire. So, although
the German system looks very formidable, through the statement that
a man is liable for service for a period of twenty-five years, an
examination of his service shows that he devotes only two uninterrupted
years to military training.
It is no easy matter to introduce an outsider into a sort of camera
obscura where the German viewpoint on militarism will be revealed. In
Prussia the content of the word is an inheritance passed on to the
whole German people by Frederick the Great. Yes, the germ of the idea
was planted by the Great Elector when Prussia was a minor principality
of little more importance in Europe at the time than Paraguay is
in South America today. Any German will tell you, with sincerest
conviction, that the strength--and he means the wealth--of the nation
is the blossoming offshoot of the military tree. Disinterested
political economists partly agree with this contention. The men brought
up in the German ideal cannot see, and will not admit it has unlovely
sides. Far from having a warping effect on the mind, the subject of
the Kaiser firmly believes the intellectual standard of Germany is
founded on military training. In a conversation with a German reserve
officer in Berlin during the early months of the war, I got the Teuton
argument in a sentence. “The Army is the poor man’s University.” Anyone
who has made a study of the German system must agree in large measure
with this dictum. My informant, who had spent several years in the
United States and knew our prejudices, went on to explain:
“In the army our citizen receives the cheapest, most thorough and
scientific education of its kind known to pedagogy. His mind is
trained. His muscles are trained. His spirit is trained. After two
years he is a complete mental, physical and moral entity.”
It was a broad statement, but, allowing for native enthusiasm,
accurate. The officer paused as if seeking in his mind a concrete
expression of his argument.
“The goose step!” His eyes lighted at the words. “Let me tell you a
secret: German soldiers enjoy the ‘goose step.’ It is the outward sign
of their devotion to an ideal. Psychologists will assure you that when
a man has complete control of his muscles--such control as develops in
army work--his mental efficiency is enormously increased. But this is
not news to you. You have seen it with your own recruits. _Nicht wahr?_”
I was constrained to admit that my observation, to a certain degree,
bore out his statements, but I could not allow that this result could
only be accomplished in military training.
“Would that those who criticize our German system could see some of
the concrete results. Take men from the mountains of Silesia. Many do
not know their right hand from their left. They cannot read or write.
The word cleanliness is absent from their vocabulary. As your poet
said, they are brothers to the ox. After two years’ hammering (this
is a quotation) ‘the peasant is transformed. He has learned to read
and write. He is clean, orderly, punctual, obedient, a credit to the
Empire.’ Such is the pernicious result of militarism!”
Passing to generalities, my companion continued:
“In the army the people are welded into one efficient national machine,
a highly trained social machine, with all its component parts working
toward a common end--the German Ideal.”
Of course, this was an officer stating his views; but he was not
a regular, only a reserve, and so not wholly tainted with the
professional habit of mind; in fact, I found practically the same
view of the effect of military training to be general throughout
Germany. Bankers, merchants, artisans--all agreed that the greatness
of the German Empire was firmly planted on the compulsory plan of
service. When this is the consensus of opinion of practically an entire
population who have tested the plan, the idea merits some hard thinking.
There are Germans who condemn the system of conscription. They are
a minority so small that finding one is like hunting through oyster
shells for pearls. The Socialists, as a party, oppose compulsory
service. However, you must use a microphone to hear any criticism
under present conditions. Dr. Karl Liebknecht, whom the German press
would like to label as a bad boy of the Reichstag, is unutterably
opposed to war and all the pomp, pageantry and prostration incident
thereto. His effusions on the subject fill several handy volumes of
the Reichstag _Record_. He feels so strongly on the point that once,
on a “seeing-the-front party” where I was a guest, this distinguished
statesman for a long time refused to appear on the same film in a
war writers’ group because some “_feldgrau Pickelhauben_”[A] filled
the background. As his colleagues, we insisted he should take the
center. He consented; but when one of the officers, without a smile,
politely invited Herr Liebknecht to join an exclusive military group
he intimated that to do so would insure something worse than eternal
damnation. And Liebknecht is elected regularly. Ernest Meyer, the
plodding editor of _Vorwaerts_, is also anti-militarist.
[A] Field-gray helmets.
The German military instructor has not the same material to work
with as is found in Switzerland. Though the educational plan adopted
includes first-class physical instruction in public schools, it is
natural that general results, in so large a population, could not be so
good as in the smaller country. Yet this fault is cured in the army.
Again, the army is the economic ally of German industrialism. When
a butcher, a baker, a barber, is enrolled he takes his place in the
specific department of the organization for which his training fits
him; and then and there his industrial efficiency advances. He is
taught to be a clean and saving butcher. As a baker he is taught the
chemistry of dough, in addition to practical bread making. The barber
becomes a rapid-fire artist. All learn the vital lesson of hygiene
as reflected in their special trades. It is unnecessary to multiply
examples. The same principles hold with shoemakers, farriers, tailors,
carpenters. In after life it is always the artisan who has completed
his two years’ service who gets the most work in his village.
There can be no quarrel with the results produced on the individuals
by army training. The salient fact that merits criticism is the
domination of national existence by military principles. The army is
a fetish in Germany. The school-boy, on his way to his lessons, packs
his books like a knapsack. Throughout his whole educational régime he
is under a discipline only little less exacting than that which he will
encounter in the army. Germany prides itself upon discipline. As a
broad discussion of it would only lead to the questions of exaltation
or the suppression of individual effort, it finds no place here. When
it comes to a choice, however, between the controlled agent and the
uncontrolled in any sphere of life, there can be no disagreement. The
German system must be judged from the German point of view, and not
from the American.
One of the factors that has contributed more than others to the
spread of military standards throughout Germany is the government
ownership of railroads. The railroads are such an important part of
a nation’s existence that any plan controlling them is sure to have
an effect upon the people at large. The great German general staff,
very rightly, consider the railroads as the first factor of the
plan of national defense. Consequently, they must be at all times
under military control. In no other manner would it be possible for
German army administration to mobilize in the necessarily short time
Germany’s geographical position demands. In time of peace, the railways
are nominally under civilian control; this is theory and not fact.
The heads of railway administration have rank in the army, and they
understand perfectly what their immediate duties would be upon the
declaration of war. So in gradation, from the highest officials down
to the most insignificant brakeman, the whole railway personnel is
organized on the military plan.
The tremendous advantage which this plan has given Germany will not be
entirely revealed until long after the existing war is concluded. We
can see the reflections of it, however, in the extraordinary capacity
of German commanders for moving their forces over the most extensive
areas in the shortest possible time.
With this symbol of militarism working through the daily life of
the German--in the manner that railroad transportation is bound to
do--it is readily understood how the essence of the evil tinctures
the whole social structure. It goes without saying that the upper
class in Germany stimulates domination by every means. They are very
careful, however, to avoid all apparent injustice in this control,
and assiduously foster the thought that it is only through a complete
surrender of individual rights that the whole nation can advance to
its ultimate destiny. Many of the pretentions of the Germans that
have appeared outrageously presumptuous to other peoples are but
expressions of this thought. And here we get the clue to the fallacy of
the whole German system. It is militarism gone mad.
The many excellencies that result from military training are
prostituted to unworthy ends. The essential fault of the
soldier--vanity--has been emphasized and developed until it has become
a national disease. It is from this seed that the German mania for
impressing their standards of “kultur” upon the rest of the world has
sprung.
From what proceeds it is easy to see how a discussion of the army
plan in Germany leads to an analysis of the whole German political
system; and would, if carried further, bring us face to face with the
controversy of autocracy _versus_ democracy. Nothing can be gained here
from carrying the argument to such lengths. We wish to learn what to
avoid in the German scheme, while selecting such excellencies as would
fall in with American traditions and ideals.
Impartial observers are wont to state that America errs as much on the
side of individual liberty as Germany does in the repression thereof.
Obviously, no comprehensive design for military organization can be put
into effect without the curtailment of personal freedom. In the United
States we want to make this curtailment a voluntary sacrifice on the
part of the individual. No citizen worthy of the name should hesitate
to surrender, of his own accord, what he is disposed to consider an
inalienable right, when he is convinced that in so doing he insures
the safety of the nation. The sacrifices made by the German people
are in response to the demand of the Kaiser, who is the sovereign. In
like manner, American citizens must make similar sacrifices--modified,
however, by altered conditions--for each individual citizen possesses
in himself the attributes of sovereignty. Therefore, it is incumbent
upon us to study this German plan, which has proved itself under the
severest tests of war, and select therefrom what is necessary and
suitable to national self-defense.
There is no possibility of our adopting any system tainted with
militarism. When all is said and done, the greatest evil of what we
classify under that term is the military caste. We must never have a
military caste in the United States. The reader does not have to be
reminded that the present American organization is an inheritance from
Baron Frederick von Steuben, and is based upon a Prussian foundation.
In a later chapter, a suggestion for modifying the system of educating
officers for the army will be put forth. There is no real reason why
the American youth who feels impelled to choose the military profession
should not seek a congenial and moderately profitable existence
in the army. With our American common-sense as a safeguard, there
is very little likelihood of such an American developing into the
sabre-clanking “Hauptmann.”
A detailed study of all the ramifications of the German military system
belongs to the province of the professional soldier; not to the
civilian. Daily, more and more data are coming to hand, throwing light
upon the working, under the test of war, of the German organization.
This review of military conditions in Germany cannot be concluded
without a statement of the cost of a peace army of 616,000 men. The
military expenditure of the German Empire entered in the budget for
1914-15 amounted to $217,000,000. That such an enormous and complex
organization can be financed for this moderate sum is the most
important lesson to be learned from Germany.