How About the Leaders?

Does the German conscript believe in the efficacy of his leaders?  I mean when he is lying awake and fatigued at night, not when he is shouting “Hoch!” or watching the demeanor of women in front of him.  Does no doubt ever lancinate him?  Again I would answer the question from general principles and not from observation.  The German conscript must know what everybody knows—­that in almost every bully there is a coward.  And he must know that he is led by bullies.  He learned that in the barrack yard.  An enormous number of conscripts must also know that there is something seriously wrong with a system that for the sake of its own existence has killed freedom of the press.  And the million little things that are wrong in the system he also knows out of his own daily life as a conscript.  Further, he must be aware that there is a dearth of really great men in his system.  In the past there were in Germany men great enough to mesmerize Europe—­Bismarck and von Moltke.  There is none today that appeals to the popular imagination as Kitchener does in England or Joffre in France.  Alone, in Germany, the Kaiser has been able to achieve a Continental renown.  The Kaiser has good qualities.  But twenty-four years ago he committed an act of folly and (one may say) “bad form” which nothing but results could justify, and which results have not justified.  Whatever his good qualities may be it is an absolute certainty that common sense, foresight, and mental balance are not among them.  The conscript feels that, if he does not state it clearly to himself.  And as for the military organization of which the Kaiser is the figurehead, it has shown for many years past precisely those signs which history teaches us are signs of decay.  It has not withstood the fearful ordeal of success.  Just lately, if not earlier, the conscript must have felt that, too.

What is the conclusion?  Take the average conscript, the member of the lower middle class.  He is accustomed to think politically, because at least fifty out of every hundred of him are professed Socialists with a definite and bitter political programme against certain manifestations of the autocracy. (It is calculated that two-fifths of the entire army is Socialist.) He may not argue very closely while in the act of war; indeed, he could not.  But enormous experience is accumulated in his subconsciousness—­experience of bullying and cowardice, of humiliation, of injustice, of lying, and of his own most secret shortcomings—­for he, too, is somewhat of the bully, out for self-aggrandisement as well as for self-defense, and his conscience privately tells him so.  The organization is still colossal, magnificent, terrific.  In the general fever of activity he persuades himself that nothing can withstand the organization; but at the height of some hand-to-hand crisis, when one-hundredth of a dogged grain of obstinacy will turn the scale, he may remember an insult from an incompetent officer, or the protectionism at home which puts meat beyond his purse in order to enrich the landowner, or even the quite penal legislation of the autocracy against the co-operative societies of the poor, and the memory (in spite of him) may decide a battle.  Men think of odd matters in a battle, and it is a scientific certainty that, at the supreme pinch, the subconscious must react.