“Yes, my boy, you are quite right,” answered König. “It is amazing how many officers have been forced into retirement of recent years, solely because of unpaid and unpayable debts. Things in this respect cannot go on much longer. For the ruin of thousands of these young officers means also the ruin of their families, and among them many of the oldest and best in the Empire. An unhealthy craze for luxurious living has seized upon the army, and God alone knows how it will end some day. It is a thing which will and must frighten every true patriot, and I wish our most gracious sovereign would take up this matter more earnestly.”
“Yes, H. M. does not attach enough importance to this chapter.”
“And yet the remedy would be such a simple one,” remarked the captain. “If H. M. would simply issue a decree to the effect that no debts of army officers up to captain’s rank shall be recoverable in court, that would be the end of army usury, and with it would be removed the worst cancer of which the whole army suffers. Once the certainty that ultimately they are sure of their money would be gone, these leeches would no longer trouble the gay and shiftless young officer whom they now pursue with the persistence of bloodhounds. But what is the use of saying this? H. M. himself is not without blame in these things. As long as his personal example all tells the other way, how can we expect the army to become prudent and economical?”
“However, Captain, that is not the sole trouble. I think as long as we as a class—or caste—are taught that we are something better than the civilian population, so long as we are guided by another code of ethics, erecting an insurmountable barrier around us, there can be no real reform. Such prejudices, or rather such systematic teaching, must inevitably lead to sharp separation between the professional soldier class and the rest of the people. Good heavens, this is the twentieth century, and no longer the middle ages, we’re living in. Caste and exclusive privileges must go, else—”
“Sh! Sh! Lower your voice, my dear boy—the colonel is looking our way, and over there stands Müller, the adjutant, always ready for tale-bearing. Let us get up and take a stroll in the moonlight, or, better still, let us go home.”
The lieutenant accompanied his superior officer as far as the door of his dwelling, and on the way spoke in tones of real concern of the fact that the cleavage between the private soldier and his superiors was so great.
“After all,” he remarked, “many of these poor devils are every bit as well educated as we,—some of them even better,—and as long as this is supposed to be a ‘nation in arms,’ and not, as in the eighteenth century, an army of mercenaries, no such strict difference, socially, ought to be made. Do you know, I often think the Socialists are not so wrong in some things they urge.”
“For goodness’ sake, my dear Lieutenant, don’t let any such remarks escape you anywhere else,” said Captain König, in a scared voice. But they had reached the captain’s door, and so they shook hands and parted.
Bleibtreu lived at the other end of the straggling little town. In walking leisurely home, he followed his train of thought. The systematic brutality shown the common soldier—even the noncom. (though not in so pronounced a manner)—by his fellow-officers had from the start been very much against his taste. “They don’t see the defender of the fatherland in him,” thought he, “but merely the green man, unused to strict discipline and to the narrowly bound round of dull duties, the clumsy, ungainly recruit, or the smarter, but even more unsympathetic private of some experience whose drill is an unpleasant task for them, and who, they know, hates and abominates them in his heart.” And he remembered scenes of such brutality, the unwilling witness of which he had been. Such cruelty and abuse of power, he felt, was playing into the hands of the Socialist Party. “These young men, fresh from the plough or the workshop,” he mused, “cannot help losing all their love for the army. So long as they serve in it, of course, they will not risk those punishments for expressing their real thoughts which the military law metes out with such draconic severity; they will prefer suffering in silence the injustice, cruelty, and inhuman treatment to which, at one time or another, nearly every one of them is subjected during their period of active service. But once dismissed to the reserve, how many, many thousands of them will naturally turn to the only political party with us which dares to oppose with courage militarism and all its fearful excrescences! And all this,” he continued inwardly, “is the natural result of a long period of deadening, enervating peace. Oh! If there were but a war! All this dross would then glide off us, and the true metal underneath would once more shine forth.”