The German Army in 1887 (I)
Victorian Armies
The following is the first part of an article written by a British officer who visited the German fortress of Metz in the summer of 1887.
Whatever diversities of opinion may exist among Englishmen as to the probability or possibility of an invasion of this country; as to our interference by force in the disputes between continental powers, or the relative merits of compulsory and voluntary service; on one point there is unanimity, namely, that if, as we are now doing , we are to pay enormous sums for the maintenance of a numerically small army, that army ought to be in the highest state of efficiency. Inferiority in quantity must be compensated by superiority in quality.
An army is, however, a machine, and as in Europe there are many, of these machines of various degrees of excellence, we must, if we wish our own to surpass others in the quality of the work it turns out, study their construction and, if possible, improve upon them. But these man-killing machines, as they have been accurately but somewhat unpleasantly called, differ from ordinary machines in the fact, too often lost sight of by would be army reformers, that the form they must take depends on the qualities of the material available in the country in which they are constructed.
It is quite certain that with the wood grown and the metal raised in Great Britain we can build a locomotive exactly similar to, and as powerful as, one constructed in Germany of the material found there; but it is an open question whether out of the adult male population of the British Isles an army exactly similar in every respect to that of the German Empire could be created with equally satisfactory results.
The wars of 1866 and 1870-71, showed, however, conclusively, that the German nation, working quietly and unostentatiously for more than half a century, had succeeded in producing a machine which, for efficiency, was far beyond all others in exist- ence; not unnaturally, European nations at once accepted it as the best of its kind, the model for imitation; and in doing so they were wise, provided they bore in mind the necessity for modifications owing to the differences in the material available for the construction.
How far the attempts at imitation have been successful cannot be ascertained until they shall have been practically tested in a campaign. It is probable that the amount of success is comparatively small, and this, not owing merely to the fact that a mode of treatment submitted to by a German might possibly be unsuited to men of other nationalities, but also because the system on which military affairs are conducted in Germany differs so greatly from those in existence in other countries.
There is no great difficulty in drilling and exercising soldiers in any fashion that may be prescribed, but to change radically the system of control and administration, is a Herculean task, requiring not merely considerable time for its accomplishment, but on the part of the authorities both power and courage, and on that of the nation belief in its necessity and desirability.
We purpose offering in this article a few waifs and strays of experience of the German system gathered in some seven or eight visits to the fortress of Metz. They are simply indications of that system picked up from time to time under exceptionally favorable circumstances, and trifling as they are in themselves, they may not be uninteresting to those who are not inclined to study closely in detail that system itself.
Metz is a veritable military multum in parvo. [This Latin phrase means “much in little.”] In it is quartered not only its garrison, but also a portion of the field army; and the visitor who does not mind “picking up the early worm,” and who keeps his eyes well open, will in the course of a fortnight ’s sojourn there, see a good deal of German military life; and if he be fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of one or two officers, his opportunities for observation will be immensely increased. A ten-pound note will cover his expenses, and as during his journey to the fortress he will pass through the beautiful Ardennes, and be able to visit the picturesque, although partially demolished, fortress of Luxembourg, the cost can hardly be considered extravagant.
Metz, the “virgin city” as it was, is full of “historic memories. ” It is not, intended, however, to reproduce them here, for they are accessible to anyone who will turn to an admirably written book, the Fall of Metz, by Mr. [George T.] Robinson, the only newspaper correspondent who had the real good fortune to be shut up in the place with [the French Marshal François Achille] Bazaine’s army.
Metz is to the German army a foreign station, for there is little or no intercourse between the officers and the well-to-do inhabitants of this part of Lorraine; and yet, what strikes one so forcibly is the apparent absence of personal ill-feeling on the part of the lower orders towards their conquerors. Possibly this is due, to a great extent, to the line taken by the Germans in their treatment of the civil population of the invaded provinces during the war.
The Germans behaved with merciless severity to any civilian who, whilst the campaign was going on, interfered directly or indirectly with the operations; but notwithstanding the pages of accusations that have been brought against them in the French press; through that real test of the conduct of an army in war, the treatment of women, the Germans passed with honor and triumphantly.
The Germans are fully aware that looseness of conduct towards women not merely exasperates the population, but demoralizes the soldier and destroys discipline; and remembering also that for idle hands the devil finds work to do, they occupied the men’s time, when it was not employed in fighting or marching, by keeping them at drill; as if they were in a barrack-yard at home.
Similarly, they utterly repudiated the idea
of plunder of the inhabitants by individual soldiers; plunder they did, but the process was carried out methodically, and strictly in an authorized manner. Still, on this matter the German conscience is more or less elastic; and when passing through the little village of Gorse near the Moselle, they appropriated so much of the food, that one unfortunate family were reduced for three days to a diet of French plums; they prob- ably quieted their scruples by the thought that they had come to fight, and that in order to fight, a man must eat.
How vague occasionally were their ideas of meum and teum [“mine” and “thine”] may be gathered from an incident recounted to me by a French officer who was employed after the war in collecting information on the subject. This gentleman, entering a house in a village in the north of France, inquired of the proprietor, a poor widow, how the Germans had behaved to her. It appeared that on the widow had been quartered an elderly colonel, of whose behavior the woman was loud in her praises.
The colonel and she had had many a pleasant chat together; he was very fond of her children, and used often, taking them on his lap, to say he wished the war was over so that he might again see at home his little ones of whom her own reminded him.
Nothing could be kinder than he was; and on the morning that he left, he came down stairs with a parcel in his hand, and gave it to her for a remembrance of him; in it were some socks for her children; such was the kindness of heart of the old German colonel.
The French officer, a little skeptical of the Teutonic virtues, took his leave and proceeded to the neighboring town, where he interrogated the Maire [mayor]. Marvelous, considering the short distance apart of the village and the town, was the difference of the impression produced by the conduct of the Germans. No words were strong enough to describe the iniquities perpetrated.
“Steal? ” Why they had stolen everything they could lay their hands on; butchers’ and bakers’ shops had been ransacked for food, whilst linen drapers ’ shops had been plundered for clothing, nor merely for the purpose of obtaining articles for their own use, but they had actually carried off children ’s socks.
Not unnaturally, the French officer’s skepticism was considerably increased by his investigation at the town; but the necessities of war render some harsh treatment of the civil population unavoidable, and the only thing the commanders can do, and they do it in their own interest as much as in that of the population, is to reduce it to a minimum.
And sometimes Paul finds that he has benefited by the robbery of Peter, as for instance in the following case, which we have seen narrated somewhere. When Metz was threatened with attack, the owner of a château in the neighborhood promptly dis- mantled it of its contents, which he conveyed into the fortress, leaving to the invaders “unfurnished apartments ” only. When Metz fell, he visited his château to make arrangements for reoccupying it, when, instead of finding nothing but bare walls, he found the château comfortably furnished. It appeared that the château had been selected by some high German official for his occupation, and therefore, from the many expeditions against villages and buildings in the vicinity were brought back some useful articles of furniture, to the ultimate benefit of the original proprietor.
Situated as is Metz almost within a stone ’s throw of the frontier, its garrison is always on the alert, and no mere playing at soldiers is possible.
The sentry, who, in German fashion is lolling and slouching about at the entrance to that fort, apparently careless of, and indifferent to, everything around him, is, all the time, keenly regarding your movements; he is not thinking of his “board of orders ” or the exact number of paces he may move right or left of his sentry box; he sees that you are a foreigner, and he argues to himself therefore that you may be a French spy; and this you will find to your cost the moment that you inadvertently put your foot the wrong side of that line across which passage is interdicted.
It is said to have been a dictum of the Iron Duke, that he could tell the condition of a regiment by the appearance of its sentries. Judged by this test, the German regiments must be in a lamentable condition, but appearances are apt to be deceptive.
It has been remarked truly, that the instinct for self-preservation which induces the German nation to bear cheerfully the almost crushing weight of its military burdens; it is this same instinct which makes the army submit to the iron system of military training and discipline imposed upon it; it is this same instinct which, especially at a station in such close proximity to the enemy as is Metz, puts life and intensity into the dreariest as well as the most interesting work of the drill ground and the field. At one side of one of the roads from the for- tress, there is a small wood.
Early one July morning, we saw a couple of soldiers cautiously approaching the wood from the direction of the fortress. Most carefully did they take advantage of all available cover, dodging from poplar to poplar along the side of the road. Presently a rifle was fired from the wood, and then the hostile occupation being an ascertained fact,
the attacking force, consisting of about a dozen men, of whom the two were the scouts, advanced to capture the woods, and assaulted it with ringing cheers.
The bugle sounded the cease fire, the de- fenders about equal in number to their op- ponents issued from the wood, and the whole party being collected were then lectured on the operation by the officer in charge of it.
Could conditions more favorable to real sound military training exist, than those under which this example of la petite guerre was carried out? [ La petite guerre is French for “small war.” At this time the term referred to both guerrilla warfare as we understand it today and the fights between small patrols in the course of conventional warfare.]
It was in this identical wood that at any moment a French detachment might some day be found; it was this same party who at that moment might possibly have to dis- lodge them from it. Everyone, therefore, from officer to the last joined recruit, had a personal interest in arriving at a thorough understanding as to the way in which they could capture the wood with least chance of losing their lives.
And with an instance of military training like this before us, and recognizing, as all must, its value as a means of increasing efficiency by interesting soldiers in their work, it is impossible to regard, with anything short of amazement, the way in which our own military chiefs ignore the existence of similar opportunities although they lie close at hand.
Source: Colonel Lonsdale Hale, “Glimpses of German Military Life”, Colburn’s United Service Magazine , No. 715 (June 1888)
Note: This is a verbatim reprint of Colonel Hale’s article. The spelling has been Americanized and longer paragraphs have been divided into two or three smaller ones. Apart from these changes, and the editorial remarks in brackets, the text is a faithful copy of the original.