The Great Illusion

realized. Astonishing as the assertion may sound, conscription in Germany is not universal, while it is in France. In the latter country every man of every class actually goes through the barracks, and is subjected to the real discipline of military training; the whole training of the nation is purely military. This is not the case in Germany. Very nearly half of the young men of the country are not soldiers. Another important point is that the part of the German nation which makes up the country’s intellectual life escapes the barracks. To all practical purposes very nearly all young men of the better class enter the army as one year volunteers, by which they escape more than a few weeks of barracks, and even then escape its worst features. It cannot be too often pointed out that intellectual Germany has never been subjected to real barrack influence. As one critic says: “The German system does not put this class through the mill,” and is deliberately designed to save them from the grind of the mill. France’s military activities since 1870 have, of course, been much greater than those of Germany⁠—Tonkin, Madagascar, Algeria, Morocco. As against these, Germany has had only the Hereros campaign. The percentages of population given above, in the text, require modification as the Army Laws are modified, but the relative positions in Germany and France remain about the same. ↩

Voz de la Nación, Caracas, April 22, 1897. ↩

Even Mr. Roosevelt calls South American history mean and bloody. It is noteworthy that, in his article published in the Bachelor of Arts for March, 1896, Mr. Roosevelt, who lectured Englishmen so vigorously on their duty at all costs not to be guided by sentimentalism in the government of Egypt, should write thus at the time of Mr. Cleveland’s Venezuelan message to England: “Mean and bloody though the history of the South American republics has been, it is distinctly in the interest of civilization that⁠ ⁠… they should be left to develop along their own lines.⁠ ⁠… Under the best of circumstances, a colony is in a false position; but if a colony is a region where the colonizing race has to do its work by means of other and inferior races, the condition is much worse. There is no chance for any tropical colony owned by a Northern race.” ↩

June 2, 1910. ↩

See an article by Mr. Vernon Kellogg in the Atlantic Monthly, July, 1913. Seeley says: “The Roman Empire perished for want of men.” One historian of Greece, discussing the end of the Peloponnesian wars, said: “Only cowards remain, and from their broods came the new generations.”

Three million men⁠—the elite of Europe⁠—perished in the Napoleonic wars. It is said that after those wars the height standard of the French adult population fell abruptly 1 inch. However that may be, it is quite certain that the physical fitness of the French people was immensely worsened by the drain of the Napoleonic wars, since, as the result of a century of militarism, France is compelled every few years to reduce the standard of physical fitness in order to keep up her military strength, so that now even three-feet dwarfs are impressed. ↩

I think one may say fairly that it was Sydney Smith’s wit rather than Bacon’s or Bentham’s wisdom which killed this curious illusion. ↩

See the distinction established at the beginning of the next chapter. ↩

M. Pierre Loti, who happened to be at Madrid when the troops were leaving to fight the Americans, wrote: “They are, indeed, still the solid and splendid Spanish troops, heroic in every epoch; one needs only to look at them to divine the woe that awaits the American shopkeepers when brought face to face with such soldiers.” He prophesied des surprises sanglantes. M. Loti is a member of the French Academy. ↩

See also letter quoted. ↩

Patriotism and Empire. Grant Richards. ↩

“For permanent work the soldier is worse than useless; his whole training tends to make him a weakling. He has the easiest of lives; he has no freedom and no responsibility. He is, politically and socially, a child, with rations instead of rights⁠—treated like a child, punished like a child, dressed prettily and washed and combed like a child, excused for outbreaks of naughtiness like a child, forbidden to marry like a child, and called ‘Tommy’ like a child. He has no real work to keep him from going mad except housemaid’s work” (John Bull’s Other Island). All those familiar with the large body of French literature, dealing with the evils of barrack-life, know how strongly that criticism confirms Mr. Bernard Shaw’s generalization. ↩

September 11, 1899. ↩

Things must have reached a pretty pass in England when the owner of the Daily Mail and the patron of Mr. Blatchford can devote a column and a half over his own signature to reproaching in vigorous terms the hysteria and sensationalism, of his own readers. ↩

The Berliner Tageblatt of March 14, 1911, says: “One must admire the consistent fidelity and patriotism of the English race, as compared with the uncertain and erratic methods of the German people, their mistrust, and suspicion. In spite of numerous wars, bloodshed, and disaster, England always emerges smoothly and easily from her military crises and settles down to new conditions and surroundings in her usual cool and deliberate manner.⁠ ⁠… Nor can one refrain from paying one’s tribute to the sound qualities and character of the English aristocracy, which is always open to the ambitious and worthy of other classes, and thus slowly but surely widens the sphere of the middle classes by whom they are in consequence honored and respected⁠—a state of affairs practically unknown in Germany, but which