Transfeldt's Instruction for Infantrymen
A family business, 1875-1918
On 10 May 1876, the premier military newspaper of the German Empire published, side by side, two reviews of a new handbook for soldiers serving in infantry regiments. The first of the reviewers praised the clarity of the printing, the quality of the illustrations, and the large amount of useful information packed into the little volume, especially where the new Mauser rifle was concerned. The second disagreed with the particulars of a inspirational story he found in the pages of Instruction for Infantrymen of the German Army (Dienstunterricht für den Infanteristen des deutschen Heeres).1
In the two decades that followed, Instruction for Infantrymen for German foot soldiers (and those charged with teaching them) went through thirty-one editions. Twenty of these had rolled off the presses in the fall of a given year, shortly before men conscripted that year reported to the barracks for their two years of service ‘with the colors’. Other editions seem to have been published in response to changes in some of the basic facts that they provided to their readers, things like uniform regulations and the peculiars of the reigning monarchs of the component states of the German Empire.
The twentieth edition of Instruction for Infantrymen appeared in 1889, the year in which the author retired, in the rank of lieutenant colonel, from active duty. In 1897, the name of a second officer appeared on the title page of the thirty-second edition of the handbook, a serving subaltern of the 12th Grenadier Regiment (2nd Brandenburg) who, like the originator of the franchise, bore the surname of ‘Transfeldt’.2 Soon after this edition hit the street, a notice of its publication in a military newspaper referred to the founder of the franchise as ‘the late Lieutenant Colonel Transfeldt of the Royal Prussian Army’.3