And so it went. Assignment to a tradition-encrusted formation garrisoned in rural Posen might or might not overbalance the advantages of a commission in a newly created regiment with a “high house number” stationed in or near a large city. The cavalry’s pecking order of lancers, cuirassiers, hussars and dragoons involved such subtle permutations of respective dates of raising and respective feats of arms that everyone was comfortably able to feel superior to everyone else. While the artillery is frequently described as being socially beneath the other combat arms, the exact balance of status and career opportunities between a nonnoble lieutenant of Berlin’s 3rd Brandenburg Artillery and an aristocrat assigned to the 172nd Infantry and stationed in the Alsatian market town of Neubreisach would have been by no means obvious to contemporaries.
For the mass of men in the ranks, the Imperial army played a major role in certifying and affirming male adulthood. The drastic changes in German society since the 1780s had invalidated many traditional male rites of passage. For women, menstruation and marriage remained the keys to adult status. Males had no equivalent generally acceptable ways of defining themselves as men. The peasant youth waiting to inherit a farm, the teenaged unskilled laborer living at home and contributing his paycheck to his parents, the junior clerk in a department store—all faced a similar problem. Their own in-group might have rituals, like the student Mensur, separating the men from the boys. These rituals, however, were likely to be meaningless or irrelevant to anyone else. At the same time, the young German man was part of a society laying significant stress on sex-role stereotypes and divisions. Nicolaus Sombart describes a Männer-gesellschaft, a rigid, militaristic, patriarchal social structure—but one with just enough fundamental doubts about its masculinity to give rise to an efflorescent homosexual movement, and to what Sombart calls Männer-bünder: societies in which the feminine component in men found legitimate expression in male relationships.16 One need not accept this argument entirely to see how in such a context military service could offer a useful psychological testing ground for males uncertain of their sexual identities.
Once in uniform the recruit found himself part of an institution whose challenges and rewards could provide balm for the wounds of modernization. The myths of both modern liberalism and traditional society asserted a direct, perceptible connection between endeavor and achievement. A man made his way through his own efforts, individually or in a group context—a contradiction more apparent to contemporary sociologists than real in the home towns and farming villages of Bieder-meyer Germany. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, industrialization and agribusiness diminished to the vanishing point any links betwen those myths and everyday reality. The alienation of labor in mines and factories was paralleled by the resentments of clerks, postmen, and the rest of an emerging white-collar world, by the frustrations of independent peasants whose economic position was visibly declining, and even by the anger of farm laborers undercut by ompetition from the Russian Empire. The prizes, tangible and intangible, of the new Germany seemed either completely out of reach or bestowed by criteria incomprehensible to the average man. Hard work now pitted a man either against machines that wore him down and broke his spirit directly, or against a system impossible to comprehend, much less master.17
The army was different. It was ultimately designed to promote success instead of failure. No military organization can function if a significant percentage of its members cannot live up to its standards. The demands of the parallel bars, the rifle range, and the drill ground might be high, but they could be met—and not only by a chosen, exceptional few. One reason why so many Germans spoke so favorably of their military service is that they experienced there the kind of triumphs, visible and recognized, that would be denied them the rest of their working lives in an industrial society. A cigar or a mark piece from the captain, a chance to win one of the kaiser’s medals, perhaps even promotion to Gefreiter towards the end of one’s second or third year, might seem trifles to the opulent bourgeoisie of the late twentieth century. But such trifles, and the implications behind them, can often do far more to motivate behavior than the most high-flown abstract principles.
Once completed, military service came increasingly to be a gateway to the adult world. Marriage, permament employment, a place at the men’s table in the local Gasthaus—all were associated, directly or indirectly, with a certificate of demobilization. Among adolescents and young adults, military service became a major demarcation line. This in turn tended to modify, if not entirely remove, resistance to the annual conscription. The way in which the process was conducted, with an entire age group inducted simultaneously, frequently in a festive environment, generated a collective spirit encouraging potential dissenters to keep their questions to themselves.
Nor was the prospective recruit entirely a pawn of fate. If he was willing to volunteer for conscription, he had the opportunity of exercising some choice of branch of service and formation. Popular regiments had waiting lists. Some senior officers grumbled that this led to an uneven distribution of high-quality manpower, with only the unambitious and the unqualified remaining to be allocated by the recruiting authorities.18 The sense of participation more than balanced this disadvantage. Regimental commanders, moreover, frequently permitted their recruits to express a preference for a certain battery or company—a preference usually allowing some possibility of improving specific circumstances. Perhaps an older brother had served in Number 6. Perhaps the Feldwebel of Number 4 came from one’s neighborhood. Perhaps the corporals of Number 10 were known not exactly to accept bribes, but to be suitably grateful for hospitality freely offered. Small choices can often appear more liberating than great ones. And anyone still wondering if his experience was really necessary could comfort himself with the observable and verifiable fact that he would return two or three years later a full-fledged adult by the standards of his peer group, his community, society in general-and probably in his own eyes as well.
The Prussian/German army’s treatment of its conscript rank and file is generally presented in terms of a coherent attempt to socialize them into the existing order: to generate enthusiastic acceptance of capitalism and Christianity, to inspire support for monarchy and aristocracy and contempt for businessmen and politicians. It is not necessary to deny this interpretation in order to suggest another dimension. Between 1871 and 1914 it grew increasingly apparent to the military that the virtues of the modern soldier were so intertwined with those of the citizen that it was impossible either to separate them, or to tell where one set began and the other ended. The army’s task was to emphasize their military aspects. Discipline imposed from above no longer enabled men to function on a modern battlefield. They needed instead what F. Scott Fitzgerald was later to describe as a “whole-souled sentimental equipment”—an equipment easier to describe than to develop in the context of an increasingly skeptical age.
Training the modern German soldier thus required a significant evolution in the army’s concept of obedience. Formal discipline, the often-criticized Kadavergehorsamkeit of barracks and drill field, was a means to an end. It was not a structure for limiting human rights, or creating obedient citizens uninterested in demanding social changes. Formal discipline was rather the first step in maintaining control on the battlefield—in making patriotism and enthusiasm into military rather than martial virtues. The killing zones and the killing power of modern weapons made rapid movement and rapid decision essential. There would be no time for debate or reflection. Men had to be conditioned to respond promptly under extreme stress, stress having no civilian equivalent. A conscript, citizen army after a long period of peace would have no combat veterans able to inculcate by osmosis the necessity of automatic response in battle. The conditioning process must therefore be theoretical, and preferably involve something disagreeable enough to generate initial resistance. This was the real purpose of the German army’s particularly rigorous close-order drill, despite constant abuse by officers afflicted by
a fondness for precision as a military absolute, and despite the certainty of criticism by civilians and enlisted men who saw the whole process as anachronistic.
Emphasis on conditioned obedience was also designed to help soldiers cope with the emptiness of the modern battlefield. Theory and experience alike indicated that even the bravest of men could be shocked into incoherence by modern firepower. Even the most willing could become lost or confused, drop behind cover, straggle to the rear, or appear on the objective after the fighting was safely over. Casualties and confusion were certain to play havoc with command structures. No modern soldier could count on remaining part of a familiar group, or receiving orders from a familiar leader. He must learn to respond to ranks, not men—to accept as a rule of thumb that his superior was better fitted to cope with a military situation because he was a better soldier.19
The lessons of 1866 and 1870/71 suggested that only conscious commitment to a collective brought favorable results in modern war. The military system’s negative sanctions posed a real threat to this commitment. Here the scholar encounters a paradox. On one hand, the empire’s records are replete with horror stories indicating tolerance, indeed acceptance, of harsh treatment escalating into obscene brutality. On the other, most of those same records were generated by the army’s efforts to solve the problem of mistreatment of enlisted men. The issue was a natural focus for interest group conflict. For socialists and liberals, tales of oppression illustrated the essential corruption of the military system. In an open society increasingly interested in scandal and exposè, human-interest anecdotes of suffering while in uniform sold books and newspapers.
The army’s claim to be a training school of the citizen made it correspondingly sensitive to charges of failure in that area. Official spokesmen tended to respond with a mixture of denial and unctuous boys-will-be-boys declarations that a barracks was not a young ladies’ seminary—not an approach calculated to enhance credibility. Specific cases, however, frequently had two sides. One might, for example, sympathize with a battery commander when some of his reservists undergoing a refresher course took the opportunity to get blind drunk. His description of the culprits as Luder and Schweinigels was not exactly refined. But his punishment of the drunks with a day’s arrest appears positively mild even by modern standards. Even his initial desire to put the whole battery through extra drill hardly seems sadistic, particularly since he dropped the idea on reflection. And the account of the incident in the Socialist Dresdner Volkszeitung bears every sign of a manufactured scandal.20
Institutionally the army refused to whitewash mistreatment. Bad NCOs, declared the Prussian war minister in 1908, did more for social democracy than political agitators. Officers and NCOs were regularly reminded in their professional literature that men brutalized on the drill field could hardly be expected to follow their tormentors into battle. Orders urged fair treatment of recruits. Investigations produced a high rate of court-martials and convictions. Administrative discipline separated other flagrant offenders from the service quietly but permanently—and without pensions or civil service employment.21
Despite this apparent commitment to abolishing brutality, it remained a persistent thorn in the army’s side. One explanation is simple: to dismiss the orders and exhortations as window-dressing. A more fruitful approach involves examining the army’s ambiguous structural position in Imperial Germany. On one hand it assumed the role of a primary social institution, demanding ultimate loyalty from and control over its personnel while on active duty—a state within a state long before Hans von Seeckt. But the army was also a secondary institution, in that its primary justifying function was instrumental. It existed not to guarantee the welfare of its members but to do something. In secondary institutions, whether armies, corporations, or universities, abstract claims of justice tend to be balanced against a pragmatic need for results. The ultimate question becomes not “What is right?” but “What is required to complete most efficiently the task for which we are here?” A boxed ear, a kicked backside, or a series of imaginative comments on a soldier’s ancestry and character deserve consideration in that context, as well as more familiar ones.
The German military establishment can hardly be exonerated from treating its draftees harshly. Officers and sergeants did not regard themselves as psychiatrists in uniform. A favorite contemporary joke involved a recruit asked by his regimental commander, “Who are the father and mother of your company?” He gave the expected answer: “The captain and the Feldwebel.” When asked what he would like to become in the service, the new private promptly replied, “An orphan.” Court-martial proceedings, civil trials, and orders from generals, kings, and emperors demonstrated that the army was no easy rite of passage. But an easy rite of passage is a contradiction in terms. In Western societies since at least the Renaissance, if not the Age of Pericles, males in particular have been conditioned against accepting the verdict of Lewis Carroll’s Caucus Race: everyone has won and all must receive prizes. The fathers, uncles, and older brothers of Imperial Germany may have enjoyed telling horror stories about their time “with the Prussians,” but they did not significantly discourage new generations of conscripts. Nor were men in their second and third years of service likely to be sympathetic to freshly shorn recruits undergoing their initial weeks of torment.
While it might be possible to apply Erich Fromm’s concept of a sado-masochistic German bourgeoisie to the workers and peasants who made up the bulk of the army’s rank and file, it seems more reasonable to conclude that on the whole, the everyday routine of peacetime service between 1871 and 1914 was not regarded as an unbearable strain on the average man in his early twenties. Exceptions were seen as just that—exceptions. If company offices were not crowded with men anxious to make the army their career, neither were guardhouses and military prisons filled with rebellious conscripts. The average German soldier of the empire was willing enough to put in his time. Negative sanctions, direct and indirect, combined with positive rewards of compliance to produce an annual intake of tractable recruits. Perhaps they deserved their nickname of Hammel in more ways than one. They were also useful raw material for any military establishment that understood its avowed task of preparing for war.
II
How well did the German army perform that task? Recent analyses present a military anachronism, dominated by an establishment unwilling to risk losing its social place by opening its professional eyes. Twentieth-century war demanded the radicalization of an institution committed to sustaining itself as part of a traditional, autocratic state structure. Faced with this choice, the German army preferred to place its strategic faith in a short, decisive war based on the gambler’s gambit of the Schlieffen Plan. Its approaches to tactics were similarly retrogressive. Taking counsel from neither the lessons of contemporary wars nor the comments of foreign critics, the German army emphasized formal discipline and parade-ground drill, denied the effects of firepower, and ultimately drove massed formations of human cattle into the slaughter-pits of 1914.22
On both human and doctrinal levels, reality was more complex. S. L. A. Marshall once declared that when a soldier is known to those around him, he has reason to fear losing the one thing he is likely to value more than life: his reputation as a man among men. The structure of the German army was designed to foster this mutual knowledge. Administratively, operationally, emotionally, its focus was the army corps. Its recruiting district coincided wherever possible with provincial boundaries or historic regions. Its triumphs were the source of loyalties and traditions; Brandenburgers of III Corps, Pomeranians of II, Württemburgers of XIII, all boasted their own histories and their own heroes. The corps was the largest, most prestigious military formation existing in peacetime. Command of one was the accepted capstone of a normally successful career. Beyond lay only the shadowy ephemera of army inspections, or the even less likely prize of chief of the general staff. Even these might seem mere baubles when compared to the power and the status a corps commander pos
sessed in his own district.
The German army of 1914 had twenty-five active corps. They resembled the modern division in combining an essential mixture of the principal combat arms. Their strength had been originally calculated at the number of men that could come into action from a single road in a single day: about 30,000 fighting men. Additions, particularly of artillery and the ammunition columns needed to keep modern quick-firing guns in action, had increased both the numbers and the transport of a German corps substantially beyond that, to over 40,000 in 1914. Since such a force was far too large to move comfortably on one road, the primary operational unit tended more and more to become the division, a practice systematized in 1915 to compensate for a shortage of strategic reserves.
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History) Page 18