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250 Militarism and Democracy in Germany
not guilty; the prosecutor asked only for
imprisonment, but the military judges
pronounced the death sentence in addition
to imprisonment. They felt they
must uphold their caste, right or wrong.
A lieutenant stationed at Memel was
found to have beaten a soldier so severely
with a sword that his victim had to be
dropped from the military service, compensated,
and pensioned for injuries "incident
to the service." Not that the
other type of officer is lacking. As the
writer knows by personal experience, there
are plenty of kindly, gifted, and charming
officers who are neither fire-eaters
nor war-worshippers, who write no jingo
books and do not subscribe to Bernhardi.
They despise the intrigues, the narrowness,
and frequent immorality of the small garrison,
and the dissipation of life in the big
cities. They recognize the mediaeval character
of the code of honor, but they are
helpless to change it, and as they grow
older the more ready they are to think an
intense militarism the normal condition of
society. If there are many officers of this
type, particularly in the south German
armies, the trend is, however, toward the
overbearing arrogance of the Von Reuters,
which is again merely saying that militarism
unchecked and unsubordinated to
civilian control will run to excesses everywhere.
The note of Bernhardi has been
more and more often heard with the cry
that war is the natural state of man and
that the German army is for war. It is
quite possible that the Kaiser, in the last
moments before the war, was overborne
against his better judgment by the General
Staff clique with which he is surrounded,
and signed the fatal order practically
under compulsion. But there were
thousands of his officers who went to the
war exulting that the time had come at
last when their years of devoted study and
ceaseless training, unsurpassed in its comprehensiveness
and its intensity, were to
give way to the practical application of all
they had learned as to man-killing.
Whether an army which by its very existence
creates fear and militaristic rivalry,
which forever talks war, can be either a
democratic force or, in the long run, a
sound educational influence is open to
gravest question. As an educational system
it has the merits described earlier in
this article; but even German professors
would hardly deny that it is bought at a
heavy cost to the school system of the
empire. If there are underpaid commonschool
teachers anywhere they live in Germany,
and particularly in Bavaria. The
genteel poverty of these men who have to
exist upon their pay is one of the great
tragedies of life under the Kaiser. But
the economic waste of the army is a chief
stumbling-block to any betterment in their
condition, precisely as the millions it costs
prevent reforms in many other directions.
It would seem as if it would be better to
have the Krupps earn less than twelve
or fourteen per cent per annum and the
school-teachers a little more. It would be
better to be less efficient as a nation to the
extent that that efficiency is created by
the army, and for the masses to be happier,
with a consequent decrease of a million
or so in the Social Democratic voters.
As long as they can roll up three millions
of votes and still protest against militarism,
even though swept off their feet in war
time, all cannot be well with a culture
founded on military force. That their
voices and many others will again be uplifted
to protest against war and armies
when peace returns is the one thing that
is certain about this war.
In no such military and bureaucratic
atmosphere as exists in Germany does
democracy thrive ! Instead, we have the
tradition that as the German Empire is
the army's creation so the nation's future
is dependent wholly upon it. Imitating
the ninety-three savants, three thousand
German teachers in universities and
schools of technology have put their names
to the statement that there is no other
spirit in the army save that of the nation;
that the spirit of German knowledge and
militarism are the same; that the German
army and the German universities are
identical in their aspirations, since both
are devoted to science. They, too, apparently
cannot understand that a culture
which exists only by reason of the arms
behind it is no more a normal, healthy
growth than is an industry artificially
created by a protective tariff and kept
alive solely by receiving part or all of its
profits by the favor of a treasury. They
belie their own culture because it is a free
growth while service in the army is com-