The feeling of amazement with which the world is looking on at the
Prussian campaigns comes not so much from the tremendous display of
physical force they afford--though there is in this something almost
appalling--as from the consciousness which everybody begins to have
that to put such an engine of destruction as the German army into
operation there must be behind it a new kind of motive power. It is
easy enough for any government to put its whole male population
under arms, or even to lead them on an emergency to the field. But
that an army composed in the main of men suddenly taken from civil
pursuits should fight and march, as the Prussian army is doing, with
more than the efficiency of any veteran troops the world has yet
seen, and that the administrative machinery by which they are fed,
armed, transported, doctored, shrived, and buried should go like
clock-work on the enemy's soil, and that the people should submit
not only without a murmur, but with enthusiasm, to sacrifices such
as have never before been exacted of any nation except in the very
throes of despair, show that something far more serious has taken
place in Prussia than the transformation of the country into a camp.
In other words, we are not witnessing simply a levy _en masse_, nor
yet the mere maintenance of an immense force by a military monarchy,
but the application to military affairs of the whole intelligence of
a nation of great mental and moral culture. The peculiarity of the
Prussian system does not lie in the size of its armies or the
perfection of its armament, but in the character of the men who
compose it. All modern armies, except Cromwell's "New Model Army"
and that of the United States during the rebellion, have been
composed almost entirely of ignorant peasants drilled into passive
obedience to a small body of professional soldiers. The Prussian
army is the first, however, to be a perfect reproduction of the
society which sends it to the field. To form it, all Prussian men
lay down their tools or pens or books, and shoulder muskets.
Consequently, its excellences and defects are those of the community
at large, and the community at large being cultivated in a
remarkable degree, we get for the first time in history a real
example of the devotion of mind and training, on a great scale, to
the work of destruction.
Of course, the quality of the private soldier has in all wars a
good deal to do with making or marring the fortunes of commanders;
but it is safe to say that no strategists have over owed so much
to the quality of their men as the Prussian strategists. Their
perfect handling of the great masses which are now manoeuvring
in France has been made in large degree possible by the
intelligence of the privates. This has been strikingly shown on
two or three occasions by the facility with which whole regiments
or brigades have been sacrificed in carrying a single position.
With ordinary troops, only a certain amount can be deliberately
and openly exacted of any one corps. The highest heights of
devotion are often beyond their reach. But if it serves the
purposes of a Prussian commander to have all the cost of an
assault fall on one regiment, he apparently finds not the slightest
difficulty in getting it to march to certain destruction, and not
blindly as peasants march, but as men of education, who understand
the whole thing, but having made it for this occasion their
business to die, do it like any other duty of life--not hilariously
or enthusiastically or recklessly, but calmly and energetically,
as they study or manufacture or plough. They get themselves killed
not one particle more than is necessary, but also not one particle
less.
A nation organized in this way is a new phenomenon, and is worth
attentive study. It gives one a glimpse of possibilities in the
future of modern civilization of which few people have hitherto
dreamed, and it must be confessed that the prospect is not
altogether pleasing. We have been flattering ourselves--in
Anglo-Saxondom, at least--for many years back that all social
progress was to be hereafter in the direction of greater
individualism, and among us, certainly, this view has derived
abundant support from observed facts. But it is now apparent that
there is a tendency at work, which appears to grow stronger and
stronger every day, toward combination in all the work of life.
It is specially observable in the efforts of the working classes
to better their condition; it still more observable in the
efforts of capital to fortify itself against them and against the
public at large; and there is, perhaps, nothing in which more
rapid advances have been made of late years than in the power of
organization. The working of the great railroads and hotels and
manufactories, of the trades unions, of the co-operative
associations, and of the monster armies now maintained by three
or four powers, are all illustrations of it. The growth of power
is, of course, the result of the growth of intelligence, and it
is in the ratio of the growth of intelligence.
Prussia has got the start of all other countries by combining the
whole nation in one vast organization for purposes of offence and
defence. Hitherto nations have simply subscribed toward the
maintenance of armies and concerned themselves little about their
internal economy and administration; but the Prussians have
converted themselves into an army, and have been enabled to do so
solely by subjecting themselves to a long process of elaborate
training, which has changed the national character. When reduced
to the lowest point of humiliation after the battle of Jena, they
went to work and absolutely built up the nation afresh. We may
not altogether like the result. To large numbers of people the
Prussian type of character is not a pleasing one, nor Prussian
society an object of unmixed admiration, and there is something
horrible in a whole people's passing their best years learning
how to kill. But we cannot get over the fact that the Prussian
man is likely to furnish, consciously or unconsciously, the model
to other civilized countries, until such time as some other
nation has so successfully imitated him as to produce his like.
Let those who believe, as Mr. Wendell Phillips says that he
believes, that "the best education a man can get is what he gets
in picking up a living," and that universities are humbugs, and
that from the newspapers and lyceum lecture the citizen can
always get as much information on all subjects, human and divine,
as is good for him or the State, take a look at the Prussian
soldier as he marches past in his ill-fitting uniform and his
leather helmet. First of all, we observe that he smokes a great
deal. According to some of us, the "tobacco demon" ought by this
time to have left him a thin, puny, hollow-eyed fellow, with
trembling knees and palpitating heart and listless gait, with
shaking hands and an intense craving for ardent spirits. You
perceive, however, that a burlier, broader-shouldered, ruddier,
brighter-eyed, and heartier-looking man you never set eyes on;
and as he swings along in column, with his rifle, knapsack,
seventy rounds of ammunition, blanket, and saucepan, you must
confess you cannot help acknowledging that you feel sorry for any
equal body of men in the world with which that column may get
into "a difficulty." He drinks, too, and drinks a great deal,
both of strong beer and strong wine, and has always done so, and
all his family friends do it, and have only heard of teetotalism
through the newspapers, and, if you asked him to confine himself
to water, would look on you as an amiable idiot. Nevertheless, you
never see him drunk, nor does his beer produce on him that
utterly bemuddling or brain-paralyzing effect which is so
powerfully described by our friend Mr. James Parton as produced
on him by lager-bier, in that inquiry into the position of "The
Coming Man" toward wine, some copies of which, we see, he is
trying to distribute among the field-officers. On the contrary,
he is, on the whole, a very sober man, and very powerful thinker,
and very remarkable scholar. There is no field of human knowledge
which he has not been among the first to explore; no heights of
speculation which he has not scaled; no problem of the world over
which he is not fruitfully toiling. Moreover, his thoroughness is
the envy of the students of all other countries, and his hatred
of sham scholarship and slipshod generalization is intense.
But what with the tobacco and the beer, and the scholarship and
his university education, you might naturally infer that he must
be a kid-glove soldier, and a little too nice and dreamy and
speculative for the actual work of life. But you never were more
mistaken. He is leaving behind him some of the finest manufactories
and best-tilled fields in the world. Moreover, he is an admirable
painter and, as all the world knows, an almost unequalled musician;
or if you want proof of his genius for business, look at the speed
and regularity with which he and his comrades have transported
themselves to the Rhine, and see the perfection of all the
arrangements of his regiment. And now, if you think his "bad habits,"
his daily violations of your notions of propriety, have diminished
his power of meeting death calmly--that noblest of products of
culture--you have only to follow him up as far as Sedan and see
whether he ever flinches; whether you have ever read or heard of
a soldier out of whom more marching and fighting and dying,
and not flighty, boisterous dying either, could be got.
Now, we can very well understand why people should be unwilling
to see the Prussian military system spread into other countries,
or even be preserved where it is. It is a pitiful thing to have
the men of a whole civilized nation spending so much time out of
the flower of their years learning to kill other men; and the
lesson to be drawn from the recent Prussian successes is
assuredly not that every country ought to have an army like the
Prussian army, though we confess that, if great armies must be
kept up, there is no better model than the Prussian. The lesson
is that, whether you want him for war or peace, there is no way
in which you can get so much out of a man as by training him, and
training him not in pieces but the whole of him; and that the
trained men, other things being equal, are pretty sure in the
long run to be the masters of the world.