A Little Garrison: A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day

by Fritz Oswald Bilse

The favorite avenue of escape offered to the young spendthrift officer is a so-called money marriage. He barters himself, his social position, and the prestige which the ownership of an old and honored name still carries with it in Germany, for the gold which his bride brings him on the wedding day. Dowries must of course correspond in some measure with the load of debt the young officer has been accumulating for years, and also with his claims to distinction and attractiveness. Such dowries vary between a paltry twenty thousand and several million marks, strictly according to circumstances. There is an unwritten code in force in this respect, every paragraph of which is made and provided to cover the individual needs of such impecunious officers. The matter is well understood throughout the land, and is looked upon as an established institution, something in which squeamish scruples are not allowed to interfere with concrete requirements. No German maiden consciously feels the shame of being thus made purely an object of barter and sale. She is to the manner bred. But of course good, fat dowries are often taken by officers, together with brides, who in other respects by no means realize their ideas of what a wife should be. Enough said on this dreary subject!

Still another evil, and one which of late has been much ventilated in Germany, is the abuse of power by officers and non-commissioned officers towards their subordinates. There has always been too much of this in the German army, and it would carry us too far afield to trace here the causes. In itself it seems a strange anomaly that in an army which calls itself by the proud term of a “nation in arms,” and whose membership is recruited from every stratum of society, there should be such wholesale maltreatment of the privates by their superior officers. And yet such is the fact, inexplicable as it seems at first sight. Against this curse the Kaiser has likewise launched his thunderbolts at some time or other. But they have had no effect. If anything there has been an increase in such cases.

At a Reichstag session, in the middle of December, the Kaiser’s spokesman, General von Einem, made the formal admission that during the preceding year no fewer than fifty officers and five hundred and seventy-nine non-commissioned officers had been court-martialed and sentenced for cruelly maltreating their subordinates. When we reflect that scarcely in one case out of every hundred formal charges are preferred by the victims, who know themselves completely in the power of their tyrannous masters, the official record thus stated is indeed appalling. But here again the Kaiser himself, as chief commander of the army, must be held largely responsible; for his more than lenient treatment of the convicted offenders is nothing less than a direct encouragement to their fellows to continue in these fiendish practices. One sergeant, a man by the name of Franzki, belonging to the Eighty-fifth Regiment of the Infantry, was shown at the trial to have been guilty of no less than twelve hundred and fifty individual cases of cruelty and of one hundred cases of abuse of power. Another man, Lieutenant Schilling, of the Ninety-eighth Regiment of Infantry, stationed in Metz, had a record against him of over a thousand such cases. Both men were recently tried and convicted, and the degree of their punishment seems strangely inadequate. Yet in most instances the Kaiser does not even allow these convicted offenders to serve out their brief terms of confinement, but issues free pardons to them after they have undergone but a small portion of their penalty.

However, from several points of view, the most serious evil of all that has grown up within the German army since the close of the Franco-German War of 1870-1871 is the cleavage in sentiment between the army and the nation. That also has been demonstrable on many occasions during recent years. I recall the case of Lieutenant von Brüsewitz, of Carlsruhe. This young officer ran his sword through the back of a defenceless civilian by whom he fancied himself insulted in a restaurant, the man dying within a few hours of the deed. His murderer attempted no other exculpation, or indeed explanation, than by saying that according to the army code of honor he was forced to avenge on the spot the insult offered him. Brüsewitz was sentenced to merely a mild type of confinement for a term of two years, but was pardoned by the Kaiser at the expiration of a twelvemonth. A more recent case was that of a young navy lieutenant who likewise stabbed to death with his sword a former schoolfellow and townsman who had not saluted him on the street with sufficient ceremoniousness. That, he said, was his only reason for killing the man, and he, too, received a very mild sentence. Even worse was the case of two officers quartered in a small garrison of the province of East Prussia, close to the Russian border. These men, being somewhat in liquor on New Year’s Eve, mortally wounded one civilian and gravely wounded another for no other reason than that these men had shouted a song distasteful to them, the whole occurrence happening in the street after midnight. The officers got off with a ludicrously small punishment.

Such facts as these—and they could be multiplied indefinitely—show, above all, one thing: the striking difference in the conception of what is termed “honor” obtaining between the officers in the army and the bulk of the population, the citizen element. The so-called “army code” embodies views which it is euphemism to call mediæval—remnants of the dark ages. And yet these views are not excused; no, they are upheld and endorsed by the Kaiser, his government, and by the army in a body.

The “code” also brings about that other absurdity, the army duel, as a mode of settling all serious “affairs of honor.” About that enough has been written in Germany itself to fill whole libraries, and yet the foolish thing continues. The Kaiser, grown up in all the prejudices of caste as held by his ancestors and by the present generation of the upper classes in Germany, has done nothing to eradicate this evil. The provisions made by him, and now carried out, for regulating the practice of duelling in his army, have had only the effect of rendering the duel as an institution still more respectable.

The main reason which impelled me to secure the authority for presenting his little work in an English dress was the fact that it tells a truthful tale about an organization of such first-rate importance as the German army. It paints that organization not only as he himself saw it, but as in its essential features it really is. In doing this Lieutenant Bilse has not only rendered an enormous service to his own country,—as indeed many thousands of Germans are recognizing to-day,—but he has also enabled the rest of the world to gain a clear insight into the inner mechanism of the most powerful fighting-machine in the world, has shown its hidden flaws, its grave organic defects, and has thus permitted us truly to gauge its inherent power. But interwoven with his criticism there is the hope, nay the conviction, that the main part of the machine is still sound.

A book of this kind, “written from the inside,” has a strong merit of its own not to be measured by its purely literary qualities; for these, I am free to admit, are not of the highest order. There is talent in it, when considering that it is the first effort of a literary tyro; but its great value lies in its intense realism, interpreting that word in its higher sense.

I have been compelled to make some alterations and omissions in my work of translation. The omissions have been due to the conviction both of myself and of my publisher, that the author has in certain instances given a mass of unnecessary details to which serious objection might be urged, in this country at least, on the score of clean literary taste. The alterations were either dictated by similar considerations or grew indirectly out of them.

With these exceptions mentioned, however, my translation may fairly claim to be true to the spirit of the original. Even the strictest moralist will not cavil at seeing equivocal situations painted in Bilse’s book when his purpose in doing so has been the radical exposure of ills existing in a body around which cluster so many traditions of honor and duty well done as is the case with the German army. And there is no excuse to be offered by me for furthering that task.