Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 | Page 4

It will be a sorrowful day for any
people when their men come to consider death on the battle-field the
greatest of evils, and the human heart will certainly have sadly fallen
off when those who stay at home have neither gratitude nor admiration
for those who shoulder the musket, or are impressed less by the
consideration that the soldiers are going to kill others than by the
consideration that they are going to die themselves. There are things
worth cherishing even in war; and the seeds of what is worst in it are

sown not in camps, barracks, or forts, but in public meetings and
newspapers and legislatures and in literature.

CULTURE AND WAR
The feeling of amazement with which the world is looking on at the
Prussian campaigns comes not so much from the tremendous display of
physical force they afford--though there is in this something almost
appalling--as from the consciousness which everybody begins to have
that to put such an engine of destruction as the German army into
operation there must be behind it a new kind of motive power. It is easy
enough for any government to put its whole male population under
arms, or even to lead them on an emergency to the field. But that an
army composed in the main of men suddenly taken from civil pursuits
should fight and march, as the Prussian army is doing, with more than
the efficiency of any veteran troops the world has yet seen, and that the
administrative machinery by which they are fed, armed, transported,
doctored, shrived, and buried should go like clock-work on the enemy's
soil, and that the people should submit not only without a murmur, but
with enthusiasm, to sacrifices such as have never before been exacted
of any nation except in the very throes of despair, show that something
far more serious has taken place in Prussia than the transformation of
the country into a camp. In other words, we are not witnessing simply a
levy en masse, nor yet the mere maintenance of an immense force by a
military monarchy, but the application to military affairs of the whole
intelligence of a nation of great mental and moral culture. The
peculiarity of the Prussian system does not lie in the size of its armies
or the perfection of its armament, but in the character of the men who
compose it. All modern armies, except Cromwell's "New Model Army"
and that of the United States during the rebellion, have been composed
almost entirely of ignorant peasants drilled into passive obedience to a
small body of professional soldiers. The Prussian army is the first,
however, to be a perfect reproduction of the society which sends it to
the field. To form it, all Prussian men lay down their tools or pens or
books, and shoulder muskets. Consequently, its excellences and defects
are those of the community at large, and the community at large being
cultivated in a remarkable degree, we get for the first time in history a
real example of the devotion of mind and training, on a great scale, to

the work of destruction.
Of course, the quality of the private soldier has in all wars a good deal
to do with making or marring the fortunes of commanders; but it is safe
to say that no strategists have over owed so much to the quality of their
men as the Prussian strategists. Their perfect handling of the great
masses which are now manoeuvring in France has been made in large
degree possible by the intelligence of the privates. This has been
strikingly shown on two or three occasions by the facility with which
whole regiments or brigades have been sacrificed in carrying a single
position. With ordinary troops, only a certain amount can be
deliberately and openly exacted of any one corps. The highest heights
of devotion are often beyond their reach. But if it serves the purposes of
a Prussian commander to have all the cost of an assault fall on one
regiment, he apparently finds not the slightest difficulty in getting it to
march to certain destruction, and not blindly as peasants march, but as
men of education, who understand the whole thing, but having made it
for this occasion their business to die, do it like any other duty of
life--not hilariously or enthusiastically or recklessly, but calmly and
energetically, as they study or manufacture or plough. They get
themselves killed not one particle more than is necessary, but also not
one particle less.
A nation organized in this way is a new phenomenon, and is worth
attentive study. It gives one a glimpse of possibilities in the future of
modern civilization of which few people have hitherto dreamed, and it
must be confessed that the prospect