A Little Garrison. Fritz Oswald Bilse

In his book, Le Débâcle, Zola shows in a vivid and intelligible manner the downfall of Napoleon III. and his army, and paints in his usual matter-of-fact tints the actual condition of the great host led forth to destruction. He makes us read in the soul of the common French soldier and in that of his commanding officer. The keen analysis of the characters he portrays enables us humanly to understand the catastrophe on the plains of Sedan. The whole Second Empire undermined by corruption; the army, head and front, honeycombed with loose morals, favoritism, and boundless conceit—we begin to perceive the main reasons underlying the utter defeat of a gallant nation. And this all the more when, side by side with the sombre painting of Zola, we read the God-fearing letters written home from the reeking battlefields by William I. and his Iron Chancellor.

Indeed, when the conquering German legions returned, in the spring of 1871, to their own firesides, they presented a body of men of whom any nation might have been proud. Elated they were at their unparalleled successes, but not puffed-up or vainglorious.

A generation has passed since then. Is the German army of to-day still of the same metal? Does it, as a body, still show the same sterling qualities which led it to victory after victory on the soil of France?

Alas, no. On that point the best and clearest minds in Germany itself are agreed. Foreign military leaders who have had opportunity to watch the German soldier of to-day at play and at work, have sent home reports to their respective governments, saying: “These are not the men that won in 1870!”

A couple of years ago several American officers of high rank, fresh from the Philippines, witnessed the great autumn manœuvres of the German army, conducted under the supreme command of William II. One of them, after viewing in stark amazement the senseless attacks of whole cavalry divisions up steep declivities or down slippery embankments, exposed all the while to a withering fire from the rifles of infantry masses, said to the present writer: “If this were actual war, not a horse or man would be left alive!”

In the Reichstag, the national parliament of Germany, many have been the heated debates and scorching has been the bitter satire passed during recent years upon the German army of to-day. And not only the solid phalanx of Socialists did the criticising on such occasions, but also not a few members of every other party, even including those of the Conservative Faction, composed of men who are the very representatives of the caste from which the Empire’s corps of officers have sprung.

The German newspaper press has sounded of late years, again and again, the note of alarm, dwelling in scathing articles on signs of decadence in the nation’s whilom pride—the army. It has pointed out the growing spirit of luxury in its ranks, the wholesale abuse of power by the officers and sergeants, the looseness of discipline, the havoc wrought by “army usurers,” the “money marriages,” so much in vogue with debt-ridden officers, the hard drinking and lax morals prevailing, the gaming for high stakes, which is another festering sore, and leads to the ruin of so many—and a whole train of other evils. The professional, that is, the military, press has joined in this chorus in more subdued tones.

Throughout the length and breadth of the Empire a spirit of disquiet, nay, of apprehension, has spread. Are the very foundations trembling on which the reunited “fatherland” rests?

If any reliance can be placed on an unbroken chain of evidence it would seem so indeed.

It was in 1786 that Frederick the Great died, leaving an army that he had raised to the pinnacle of fame. With this army he had faced and vanquished, standing at bay against almost the whole of continental Europe, his powerful foes. Little Prussia, a straggling strip of territory stretching from the ice-bound Niemen to the vine-clad Rhine, Frederick’s genius had lifted until it took rank with the powers that prescribe laws to the world.

A score of years later, just one short score, the hills of Jena looked down upon the crushing, disgraceful defeat of this same Prussian army. The country was dismembered, and as a political force ceased to exist. The heel of the Corsican despot was on its neck. Even after the restoration of Prussia by the Vienna Congress in 1815, it required another half-century to give her back her lost prestige. Sadowa and Sedan reinstated Prussia, and with her the allied

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