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248 Militarism and Democracy in Germany
never asked more than a week's or three
days' imprisonment as punishment! Colonel
von Reuter is reported to have won
the Iron Cross; and the young officer who
sabred the lame cobbler of Zabern is also
at the front, but not, let us trust, in the
name of democracy. In defending Colonel
von Reuter, the minister of war, General
von Falkenhayn, who has been acting
as chief of staff during the recent temporary
illness of General von Moltke, declared
that while the colonel might have
exceeded his authority at times, his acts,
nevertheless, saved his officers from the
necessity of running their swords through
the insulting civilians in order to protect
the honor of the "Kaiser's Coat." This
coat—hardly a democratic garment—thus
inevitably recalls Gessler's hat; the General
Staff means that there shall be no vital
difference between the deference asked of
Wilhelm Tell and that which the German
civilian owes to the "gay coat" of the military.
Officers have frequently been applauded
and acquitted, or at most imprisoned
in a fortress for a few weeks, for
stabbing civilians or killing them in duels
that are against the law but are often
forced upon officers by decrees of the regimental
courts of honor whose ideals of
conduct are direct inheritances from the
days of Frederick the Great.
In brief, the army is a narrow caste with
professional ideals of a mediaeval character
scrupulously maintained in the face
of modern progress by the ruling clique.
From its highest officers, its General Staff,
its Crown Prince, as well as its Kaiser, the
army takes its tone as a bulwark of the
privileged classes, to whom anything that
smacks of democracy is anathema. It is
the chief pillar of the great landlords, the
Junker, and the aristocrats, as it is of the
throne. When the Reichstag passed a
vote of censure on the government because
of the Zabern affair, an almost unheard-of
thing, the government simply
ignored the vote. Doubtless the imperial
chancellor and General von Falkenhayn,
the censured ministers, smile to-day if
they think of this incident, and reflect
how completely the war has placed the
Reichstag, the Social Democrats, and all
the rest of the civilians in their power.
There being no responsible ministry to fall
in Germany, the fate of the nation has
rested—less than a year after their censure
by the national parliament—in their
and the Kaiser's hands. As for the
Kaiser, and the Crown Prince who publicly
upheld Colonel von Reuter, they may
for the moment be democrats—the Kaiser
has declared that he will never take note
of factional differences again—but the
only reason why they do not fear the
Social Democrats, whom a few years ago
the Kaiser denounced as traitors to the
country, is the existence of the army.
General von Falkenhayn declared in the
Reichstag, in December, 1913, that "without
the army not a stone of the Reichstag
building would remain in place." Is there
any doubt that this democratic organization
of eight hundred thousand men would
close the doors of the Reichstag if the
Kaiser so ordered? Did not the grandfathers
of those now in the trenches in the
Imperial Guard regiments crush out the
republican uprising in 1848? Did not
the Prussian guns of the grandfather of
the present Kaiser shoot to pieces the
same uprising in Rhenish Bavaria, Baden,
and elsewhere ?
In this anti-democratic tendency the
German army is not different from any
other. The same trend toward caste and
autocracy is noticeable, to greater or less
degree, in every army; even a study of the
social life of our American navy would
prove this. If England creates a great
standing army the same phenomena will
be still more manifest than in her present
regular force, which has been about the
most undemocratic machine thinkable.
The social, court, and petticoat influences
that controlled the British service down to
the Boer War have been known of all informed
men. It took this present war,
with its overwhelming need for officers, to
break down the barriers of caste erected
against the common soldier. Lord
Kitchener did an unheard-of thing recently
when he advanced one hundred
and twenty-five sergeants and corporals to
lieutenancies in a single issue of the official
Gazette, yet no one would describe
Lord Kitchener as an apostle of democracy.
The nature of an army and its very organization
are undemocratic; the whole basis
is a hierarchy with the power centring in
one head.
Of course, the autocratic nature of an