I.
PRUSSIA is before all else a military State, and since 1871 Prussian militarism has laid its heavy hand upon Southern Germany, the inhabitants of which were formerly noted for their peaceful ways. The warlike spirit of the Prussians is the fruit of the statesmanship pursued by their rulers, those Electors of Brandenburg who afterwards became Kings of Prussia. The Elector of the Thirty Years’ War period, George William, had played but a humble part in that struggle. His sole desire was to keep his States independent, free from the grasp of the Swedes and of the Imperial troops, and he trimmed ingloriously between Gustavus Adolphus and Ferdinand II. The Great Elector, Frederick William, was the first to embody the territorial ambitions of his house. In order to realize them, he saw the necessity of a powerful standing army, out of all proportion to the size and status of his Electorate. These troops enabled him to figure among the adversaries of Louis XIV., and, at the Battle of Fehrbellin, to strike a deadly blow at the power and reputation of the Swedes in Germany. The Prussian army had now vindicated itself as an effective fighting force. It was the means by which this martial prince extended his territory and made it large enough to be converted into a kingdom under his successor, Frederick I., who obtained a royal crown from the Emperor Leopold as the price of his military and financial support.
The second King of Prussia, Frederick William I., although not of an enterprising nature, applied himself to enlarging and perfecting the instrument which, in the hands of his son Frederick II. (the Great), was destined to become the finest army in Europe and the model that other nations did their best to copy. After fighting victoriously, however, under the command of a great leader, against a coalition of three powerful monarchies, and showing itself more than a match for the best troops that Russia, Austria, and France could muster, the Prussian army suddenly lost its pre-eminent position. The eclipse was so complete that it seemed at first to be final.
The Prussians were repulsed at Valmy, and afterwards proved helpless against the conscripts of the Republic. In spite of this, their military prestige was not yet seriously impaired. Thanks to the genius of Napoleon and the wonderful efficiency of his soldiers, it was entirely shattered in the campaign of 1806. It was not only the battle of Jena, but another humiliating defeat, inflicted the same day by one of Napoleon’s subordinates on the King of Prussia’s troops, that proved the decadence of the latter and the incapacity of their generals, trained in the school of Frederick the Great. The disaster of Jena is readily acknowledged in Berlin, but the German historians have little to say about the day of Auerstädt, the true Nemesis for Rossbach.
Prussian militarism raised its head once more during the war of liberation. It was the life and soul of the resistance to Napoleon, and contributed its share towards the final deliverance. Still, we must beware of overrating the part played by Blücher, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Yorck, Bülow, and the other generals of Frederick William III. in 1813 and 1814 The Corsican was vanquished by his own blunders—the exhausting war in the Peninsula, where the best blood of France was spilt to no purpose, and the ill-fated Russian campaign. During the early summer of 1813, the Russians and the Prussians, in several hard-fought battles, met with nothing but defeat. The emancipation of Germany would have been far from assured, if Austria, who had completed her preparations, had not joined hands with Russia and Prussia to overwhelm Napoleon. During the wars of the French Empire, it is the Archduke Charles and the Austrian troops, not the Prussian armies, that can claim the honour of having offered the most stubborn resistance to the great conqueror. In the same way, during the Hundred Days, old Blücher—“Marshal Forward,” as the Germans call him—is not entitled to the first place among the heroes of Waterloo. The chief glory may fairly be assigned to Wellington and to the bulldog tenacity of the British.
A long second period of decadence set in for Prussian militarism after 1815, under the peaceful reigns of Frederick William III. and William IV. Its decline was particularly apparent at the time of the inglorious Convention of Olmütz. To William I. fell the task of re-forging the chain of great Hohenzollern warrior-princes, broken at the death of Frederick the Great. Not that he himself was endowed with the talents of a commander-in-chief; when it came to actual fighting he was merely a soldier. But he had a faculty more precious in a king than the art of leading an army: he was an excellent judge of men, and could choose the most suitable tools for carrying out the plans he had sanctioned. William I. made Bismarck head of the Prussian ministry, leaving him a free hand for conducting the bold policy that was to establish the greatness of the Prussian royal house on the basis of German unity, and then gave him two indispensable fellow-workers—Roon, the reorganizer of the army, and Moltke, the Chief of the General Staff. Strictly speaking, the future Field-Marshal did not evolve any new system of strategy, but he had absorbed the teachings of Frederick the Great and the object lessons of Napoleon so thoroughly that he became in his turn a master in the art of war.
As for Prussian militarism, or, in other words, the military caste, the victories of 1866 and 1870 completely turned its head. It came to regard itself as the very embodiment of the nation. Never had it been more powerful or more domineering than in the generation preceding the present war. Woe to the civilian who ventured to criticise the army, or got in an officer’s way on the pavement, or did not cringe before the fiat of a corps commander! The recent Zabern affair showed us that the German military can allow themselves anything. On this occasion, public opinion finally gave its verdict in their favour, notwithstanding the protests (speedily silenced!) of the Reichstag.