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 possessed 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.