Sigismund Borkheim, the author of the following pamphlet, was 
born in Glogau on March 29, 1825. After completing his 
grammar-school education in Berlin in 1844, he studied in turn in 
Breslau, Greifswald and Berlin. Since he was too poor to bear the 
costs of the one-year military service, he satisfied his obligations to 
the army by joining in 1847 the artillery in Glogau as a three-year 
volunteer. After the 1848 revolution he took part in democratic 
meetings and this led to his being investigated by a court martial, 
from which he escaped by fleeing to Berlin. Here, safe from 
pursuit for the moment, he remained active in the movement and 
played an outstanding role in the storm on the Arsenal.°%? A 
further flight to Switzerland became necessary to evade the new 
threat of arrest arising from this. In September 1848, when Struve 
organised the march of his volunteer corps to the Black Forest in 
Baden,*” Borkheim joined his force, was captured and remained 
in gaol until the Baden Revolution of May 1849°° liberated the 
prisoners. 

Borkheim went to Karlsruhe to offer his services as a soldier to 
the revolution. When Johann Philipp Becker was appointed 
colonel in command of the entire people’s militia, he gave 
Borkheim the task of forming a battery for which the government 
initially supplied only the unharnessed guns. The horse teams had 
still not arrived when the movement of June 6 broke out.*”’ This 
was an attempt by the more resolute elements to induce the inert 
provisional government, which consisted in part of outright 
traitors, to bestir itself to greater efforts. Along with Becker, 
Borkheim had taken part in the demonstration whose only 
immediate effect, however, was that Becker, together with all his 

volunteers and militiamen, was sent away from Karlsruhe to join 
the front on the Neckar. Borkheim could not follow him with his 
battery until he had been provided with horses for his cannons. By 
the time he was finally issued with these—Herr Brentano, the 
head of the government, found it was very much in his interest to 
get rid of the revolutionary battery—the Prussians had already 
conquered the Palatinate and the first act of Borkheim’s battery 
was to take position on the Knieling Bridge and cover the 
withdrawal of the Palatinate army to Baden territory. 

Together with the troops from the Palatinate and those from 
Baden still stationed around Karlsruhe, Borkheim’s battery now 
advanced in a northerly direction. On June 21 it saw action at 
Blankenloch and played an honourable part in the encounter at 
Ubstadt (June 25). As part of the reorganisation of the army for 
its new positions on the River Murg, Borkheim and his artillery 
were assigned to the Oborski Division and distinguished himself in 
the fighting around Kuppenheim. 

After the withdrawal of the revolutionary army to Swiss 
territory, Borkheim went to Geneva. Here he found his old 
commander and friend, J. Ph. Becker, and some younger com- 
rades-in-arms, and they all banded together to form as cheerful a 
society as possible amidst the privations of refugee life. I myself 
spent several enjoyable days with them when I passed through 
there in autumn 1849. This was the same society that under the 
name of the “Brimstone Gang” acquired a highly undeserved 
posthumous notoriety thanks to the colossal lies of Herr Karl 
Vogt. 

However, the fun was not to last long. In the summer of 1850 
the arm of the stern Federal Council reached also the harmless 
“Brimstone Gang”, and the majority of its happy-go-lucky 
members were forced to leave Switzerland, since they were among 
the categories of refugees to be expelled. Borkheim went to Paris 
and subsequently to Strasbourg. But here too his stay was cut 
short. In February 1851 he was arrested and taken under police 
escort to Calais for deportation to England. For a whole three 
months he was dragged from place to place, for the most part in 
chains, through 25 different prisons. But wherever he came, the 
republicans had been notified in advance, and they went out to 
meet the prisoner, made sure he was well-provided for, did deals 
with and bribed the police and officials, and provided transport 
whenever possible. In this way he finally arrived in England. 

Of course, he found the condition of the refugees in London 
far more wretched than in Geneva or even in France, but even 

here his resilience did not desert him. He looked around for work 
and found it at first in a Liverpool emigration firm which needed 
German clerks to act as interpreters for the numerous German 
emigrants bidding farewell to their old fatherland in which peace 
and quiet had at last been restored. At the same time, he looked 
around for other business contacts and was so successful that after 
the outbreak of the Crimean War, he managed to despatch a 
steamship laden with all sorts of goods to Balaclava and, once 
there, to sell the cargo at fantastic prices, partly to the army 
authorities and partly to the English officers. On his return he had 
made a net profit of £15,000 (300,000 marks). But this success 
only spurred him on to further speculation. He made an 
agreement with the English Government to arrange for a further 
shipment. However, since by this time peace negotiations were 
already underway, the government stipulated in the contract that 
it could refuse to take delivery of the goods if the peace 
preliminaries had been settled by the time they arrived. Borkheim 
agreed to this. When he arrived in the Bosporus with his 
steamship, peace was already a fact. Since the ship had only been 
hired for the outward voyage and since any amount of lucrative 
cargoes could be obtained for the return journey, the captain 
insisted on unloading without delay. The harbour was full to 
bursting point and as Borkheim was unable to find anywhere to 
store the cargo which was now left on his hands, the captain 
simply unloaded everything on the nearest beach. So Borkheim 
was stuck there in the middle of his useless crates and bales and 
barrels and had to helplessly watch his wares being plundered by 
the rabble that had come to the Bosporus from all corners of 
Turkey and the whole of Europe. When he returned to England 
he found himself a pauper again—the £15,000 were all gone. His 
irrepressible resilience, however, was still there. He had lost all his 
money through speculation, but had gained a knowledge of 
business and made contacts in the world of commerce. He now 
discovered that he had an extremely fine palate for wine and 
became a successful representative for various Bordeaux export- 
ers. 

At the same time, however, he remained as active as he could in 
the political movement. He had known Liebknecht from Karlsruhe 
and Geneva. He came into contact with Marx through the Vogt 
scandal and in this way I renewed my acquaintance with him. 
Without committing himself to any specific programme, Borkheim 
always sided with the most extreme revolutionary party. His 
principal political activity was combating the great bulwark of 

European reaction, Russian absolutism. So as to be better able to 
follow the Russian intrigues designed to subjugate the Balkans and 
indirectly increase its influence in Western Europe, he learnt 
Russian and spent many years studying the Russian daily press 
and émigré writings. Among other things, he translated Serno- 
Solovyevich’s pamphlet Our Russian Affairs which denounced the 
hypocrisies fabricated by Herzen (and continued subsequently by 
Bakunin) as a result of which the Russian refugees in Western 
Europe propagated not the truth they knew about Russia, but a 
conventional legend which fitted in with their nationalist and 
Pan-Slavist twaddle. He also wrote many essays on Russia for the 
Berlin Zukunft, the Volksstaat and so on. 

In the summer of 1876, while on a visit to Germany, he 
suffered a stroke in Badenweiler which left him paralysed to his 
last day on the left side of his body. He was forced to give up his 
business. His wife died some years later. Since he had a weak 
chest, he had to move to Hastings so as to enjoy the mild sea air 
of the South English coast. Neither paralysis, nor illness, nor his 
straitened and far from assured means of subsistence were 
able to break his irrepressible mental powers. His letters were 
always cheerful to the point of exuberance, and when you visited 
him you had to help him laugh. His favourite reading matter was 
the Zurich Sozialdemokrat. He died after an attack of pneumonia 
on December 16, 1885. 

The Blood-and-Thunder Patriots appeared straight after the war 
against France in the Volksstaat and soon after in an off-print. It 
proved to be a highly effective antidote to the mood of 
super-patriotic intoxication which overcame and which still affects 
both the German authorities and the German bourgeois. And, 
indeed, there could have been no better aid to sobering down than 
to recall the time when the same Prussia which was now praised to 
the skies had collapsed ignominiously before the onslaught of the 
same Frenchmen who were now being derided as the vanquished 
foe. And the medicine had to be all the more effective since the 
facts it recounted were drawn from a book in which a Prussian 
general, who was moreover the director of the general Academy 
of War, had used official Prussian documents to portray the 
moment of humiliation—and it should be admitted, in an 
impartial and dispassionate manner.’ Like any other large social 

organisation, a great army is never better than when it turns in 
upon itself after a major defeat and does penance for its past sins. 
This was the fate of the Prussians after Jena, and again after 1850. 
In the latter case, even though they had not suffered a major 
defeat, their total military decline became palpably clear both to 
themselves and to the whole world in a series of minor 
campaigns—in Denmark and South Germany—and in the first 
large-scale mobilisation of 1850, when they only averted a real 
defeat by the political humiliations of Warsaw and Olmütz.**? They 
were forced to subject their own past to ruthless criticism in order 
to learn how to repair the damage. Their military literature, which 
in Clausewitz had brought forth a star of the first magnitude, but 
which had since sunk to unbelievable depths, arose once more 
under the necessity for this self-examination. And one of the fruits 
of this self-examination was Hépfner’s book from which Borkheim 
culled the material for his pamphlet. 

Even today it will be essential to recall again and again that age 
of arrogance and defeat, of the incapacity of the monarch, of the 
naive cunning of the Prussian diplomats ensnared in their own 
double-dealing, of the aristocratic officer-class whose loud- 
mouthed swaggering outlived their cowardly betrayals, and of the 
total collapse of a state-authority estranged from the people and 
based on lies and deception. The German philistine (and that 
includes the nobility and the princes) is, if possible, even more 
conceited and chauvinistic than he was then; diplomatic practice 
has become significantly more insolent, but it is as two-faced as 
ever; the aristocratic officer-class has grown sufficiently, both by 
natural and by artificial means, to enable it more or less to regain 
its old control over the army; the state is becoming more and 
more estranged from the masses of the people and is now well on 
the way to transforming itself into a consortium of landowners, 
stockbrokers and big industrialists for the exploitation of the 
people. True enough, if another war breaks out the Prussian- 
German army will have significant advantages over its opponents 
as well as its allies, if only because it was the model they all 
imitated. But these advantages will never again be as great as in 
the last two wars.’’? The unity of the supreme command, for 
example, such as existed then, thanks to particularly fortunate 
circumstances, and the corresponding unconditional obedience of 
the lower echelons, is unlikely to recur in the same way. The 
business clique which now occupies a dominant position between 
the agrarian and military nobility—right up to the Emperor’s 
entourage—and the stockjobbers, can easily prove fatal for the 

provision of the army in the field. Germany will have allies, but it 
will leave them in the lurch, and they Germany, at the first 
opportunity. And, finally, the only war left for Prussia-Germany to 
wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover, of an extent and 
violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be 
at each other’s throats and in the process they will strip Europe 
barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty 
Years’ War*'! compressed into three to four years and extended 
over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into 
barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute 
misery; irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of trade, 
industry and credit, ending in universal bankruptcy; collapse of 
the old states and their conventional political wisdom to the point 
where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen, and no one 
will be around to pick them up; the absolute impossibility of 
foreseeing how it will all end and who will emerge as victor from 
the battle. Only one consequence is absolutely certain: universal 
exhaustion and the creation of the conditions for the ultimate 
victory of the working class. 

That is the prospect for the moment when the systematic 
development of mutual oneupmanship in armaments reaches its 
climax and finally brings forth its inevitable fruits. This is the pass, 
my worthy princes and statesmen, to which you in your wisdom 
have brought our ancient Europe. And when no alternative is left 
to you but to strike up the last dance of war—that will be no skin 
off our noses. The war may push us into the background for a 
while, it may wrest many a conquered base from our hands. But 
once you have unleashed the forces you will be unable to restrain, 
things can take their course: by the end of the tragedy you will be 
ruined and the victory of the proletariat will either have already 
been achieved or else inevitable. 

London, December 15, 1887 
Frederick Engels