Written in February 1893; Foreword, on 
March 28 

(without Foreword) in the Vorwarts, 
Nos. 51-56, 58 and 59, March 1-5, 7, 9 
and 10, 1893 and, in full, as a pamphlet 
in the end of March 1893 

Signed: Frederick Engels 

time 

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Title page of the pamphlet Can Europe Disarm? 

371 

FOREWORD 

The articles reprinted here were published in the Berlin 
newspaper Vorwdrts in March 1893, during the Reichstag debate 
on the Military Bill. 

In them I proceed from the assumption that is increasingly 
gaining general acceptance: that the system of standing armies has 
been carried to such extremes throughout Europe that it must 
either bring economic ruin to the peoples on account of the 
military burden, or else degenerate into a general war of 
extermination, unless the standing armies are transformed in good 
time into a militia based on the universal arming of the people. 

], attempt to prove that this transformation is possible right at 
this moment, even for the present governments and in the present 
politica] situation. I thus take this situation as my basis and for the 
time being propose only such means as could be adopted by any 
government of the day without jeopardising national security. I 
simply seek to establish that from a purely military point of view 
there is nothing whatever to prevent the gradual abolition of 
standing armies; and that, if these armies are nevertheless 
maintained, it is for political and not military reasons—that, in a 
word, the armies are intended to provide protection not so much 
against the external enemy as the internal one. 

However, I consider the gradual reduction of the term of 
service by international treaty, which forms the core of my 
argument, to be the simplest and quickest way possible of effecting 
the general transition from a standing army to the arming of the 
people organised as a militia. The terms of such a treaty would 
naturally vary according to the nature of the contracting 
governments and the political situation of the day. And things 

could not possibly be more favourable than at present; if it is 
possible even today to set a maximum term of service of two years 
as a starting point, in a few years it may be possible to choose a 
much shorter period of time. 

By making the physical and military training of all male youths 
an essential condition for the transition to the new system, I 
expressly preclude the possibility of the military system proposed 
here being confused with any other militia now in existence, e.g., 
the Swiss one. 

London, March 28, 1893 
F. Engels 

For the past twenty-five years all Europe has been arming on a 
hitherto unprecedented scale. Every major power is seeking to 
surpass another in military might and readiness for war. Germany, 
France and Russia are exhausting themselves in their efforts to 
outdo one another. At this very moment the German government 
is demanding from the people a new exertion so tremendous that 
even the present tame Reichstag shrinks away from it. Is it not 
folly, then, to talk of disarmament? 

And yet in all countries the classes of people who almost 
exclusively have to provide the bulk of the soldiers and pay the 
bulk of the taxes are crying out for disarmament. And yet 
everywhere the effort has reached the stage where its strength— 
here the recruits, there the money, somewhere else both—is 
beginning to fail. Is there no way out of this blind alley except 
through a war of destruction such as the world has never seen? 

I maintain: disarmament and thus a guarantee of peace is 
possible, it is even comparatively easy to carry out, and Germany 
more than any other civilised state has the power, as well as the 
mission, to carry it out. 

After the war of 1870-71, the superiority of the system of 
universal compulsory military service with a reserve and Land- 
wehr—even in its then stunted Prussian form **°—over the system 
of conscription by proxy had been conclusively demonstrated. All 
the continental countries adopted it in more or less modified 
forms. There would not have been any great harm in this itself. 
An army that has its main reserve in middle-aged married men is 
by its very nature less offensive than was the conscript army of 

Can Europe Disarm? 373 

Louis Napoleon, which was heavily permeated by paid proxies— 
recruited professional soldiers. But then came the annexation of 
Alsace-Lorraine, which turned the Peace of Frankfurt into a mere 
ceasefire for France, as the Peace of Tilsit**! had been for Prussia. 
And now began the feverish arms race between France and 
Germany, into which Russia, Austria and Italy were also gradually 
drawn. 

To start with, the obligatory term of service in the Landwehr was 
extended. In France the territorial army acquired a reserve of 
older men; in Germany the second levy of the Landwehr and even 
the Landsturm were revived.*” And so it went on, step by step, 
until the age limit set by nature was reached and even exceeded. 

Then conscription was stepped up and the new training cadres 
which this made necessary were set up; but here again the limit 
has been almost or fully reached, and in France has even been 
exceeded. The last enlistment intakes of the French army already 
include quite a number of young men who are not yet—or not at 
all—equal to the hardships of service. The English officers, 
impartial on this point, who attended the large manoeuvre in 
Champagne in 1891 and acknowledged the high efficiency of the 
present French army, generously and at times admiringly, report 
unanimously that an excessively large number of young soldiers 
dropped out in the course of the marches and combat exercises. 
In Germany we have admittedly not yet exhausted our reserves of 
men fit for military service, but to remedy that is precisely the 
purpose of the new Military Bill. In short, even in this respect we 
are approaching the limits of our powers. 

Now the modern, the revolutionary aspect of the Prussian 
military system consists precisely in the demand that the strength 
of every able-bodied man should be placed at the service of 
national defence for as long as he is capable of bearing arms. And 
the only revolutionary thing that can be discerned in all military 
development since 1870 is the very fact that it has been deemed 
necessary—often enough with some reluctance—actually to in- 
creasingly carry out this demand, which had hitherto only been 
fulfilled in chauvinist fantasy. Neither the term of service liability 
nor the enlistment of all able-bodied young men can be called into 
question today, least of all by Germany and. even less by the Social- 
Democratic Party, which, quite the contrary, is the only force able 
to translate also this demand fully into practice. 

Accordingly there remains only one point where the need for 
disarmament can apply the lever: the term of service with the 
colours. And this, in fact, is the Archimedean point: international 

regulation, by the great powers of the Continent, of the maximum 
term of active service with the colours for all arms of the service, 
initially for two years, as far as I am concerned—but with the 
proviso of an immediate further reduction as soon as people are 
convinced of the possibility, and with the militia system as the ultimate 
objective. And I maintain that Germany in particular is better able 
to make this proposal, and that Germany will profit more than 
anyone else by making it, even if it is rejected. 

Il 

The international regulation of the maximum term of service 
with the colours would affect the armies of all powers equally. It is 
generally assumed that, in armies whose men have never been 
under fire, for the initial phase of a campaign the term of active 
service—within certain limits—provides the best measure of their 
suitability in all war situations, particularly for strategic and tactical 
attack. Our warriors of 1870 had sufficient experience of the furia 
francese, of the bayonet attack of the long-serving imperial infantry 
and the full force of the cavalry attacks at Worth and Sedan; but 
at Spichern, right at the beginning of the war, they also 
demonstrated that they could expel this same infantry from a 
strong position—even though outnumbered.** Generally speak- 
ing, then, let us concede that within certain limits, which vary with 
the national character, in troops with no experience of war the 
term of service with the colours is decisive with regard to their 
general suitability for war and particularly their fitness for the 
offensive. 

If we succeed in setting a maximum limit to their term of 
service internationally, the relative capacity of the various armies 
will remain roughly what it is today. What one forfeits in 
immediate potential, the others will also forfeit. Insofar as a 
surprise attack by one state on another is excluded, it will continue 
to be so, to the same extent. The difference in the term of active 
service between France and Germany, for instance, has up till now 
not been such that it is of any importance; even under the 
reduced term of service everything would depend on how the 
agreed term of service was used in each of the armies, just as it 
does today. Apart from this, the relative strength of the two 
armies would correspond to the ratio between the populations of 
the two countries. Once universal compulsory military service is 
actually introduced, in countries of roughly equal economic 

Can Europe Disarm? 375 

development (which determines the percentage of the unfit) the 
population size will always be the measure of the strength of the 
armed forces. Then there will be no more tricks like the Prussian 
tricks of 1813; that cream will have been skimmed off. 

But a great deal is dependent on how the established term of 
service is utilised. And on this subject there are men in almost all 
armies who could tell a tale or two if they were— permitted to, for 
shortage of money has everywhere forced armies to give a 
proportion of their recruits a “makeshift” training in a few 
months. Then they have to restrict themselves to essentials, a 
whole lot of traditional tomfoolery is thrown out of the window, 
and they find to their surprise how little time it takes to make a 
soldier out of a tolerably well-built young man. Bebel has related 
in the Reichstag how this astonished the training officers of the 
German Ersatzreserve.** In the Austrian army there are plenty of 
officers who maintain that the Landwehr, which has about the same 
term of service as the German Ersatzreserve, is better than the line. 
No wonder. There they lack the time that is wasted in the line on the 
traditional and hence sanctified idiocies—and for this very reason it 
is not wasted. 

The German infantry regulations of 1888 limit the tactical 
formations for battle to the essentials. It contains nothing new; 
fighting ability in all reversed situations had already been 
introduced by the Austrians after 1859; the formation of all 
battalion columns by means of a simple combination of four 
company columns had been introduced at about the same time by 
the Darmhessians, who had to succumb to this rational formation 
again being prohibited by the Prussians after 1866.°*° In other 
respects the new regulations do away with an immense tangle of 
antediluvian ceremonies that were as useless as they were 
sancrosanct; least of all do I have any reason to find fault with it. 
For after the war of 1870 I allowed myself the luxury of drawing 
up a plan of the closed formations and movements of companies 
and battalions appropriate to present-day warfare, and was not a 
little surprised to find this piece of the “state of the future” 
implemented in almost every particular in the relevant sections of 
the new regulations. 

But the regulations are one thing, and putting them into practice is 
another. The martinets, which have always flourished in the Prussian 
army in times of peace, reintroduce the time-wasting abolished in the 
instructions through the back door of the parade-ground. All at once 
parade drill is vitally necessary to counterbalance the unruliness 
of the dispersed battle order, as the sole means of establish- 

26* 

ing true discipline, etc., etc. This is tantamount to saying 
that order and discipline can only be established by making 
the men practise utterly useless things. The abolition of the 
“goose step” alone would make whole weeks available for rational 
exercises, quite apart from the fact that foreign officers could 
then watch a German review without laughing up _ their 
sleeves. 

Another similar obsolete institution is sentry duty, which, 
according to an old traditional notion, also serves to develop the 
intelligence and especially the independent thought of the men by 
teaching them the art—in case they are not already familiar with 
it—of standing guard and thinking of nothing at all for two 
hours. In view of the present universal custom of practising 
outpost duty in the field, sentry duty in town, where there are 
after all security police of every kind, has become totally senseless. 
Its abolition would result in at least a twenty per cent gain in the 
effective term of service for the army and ensure safety on the 
streets for civilians. 

And then there are everywhere a lot of soldiers who on all sorts 
of pretexts do as little service as possible: company craftsmen, 
batmen, etc. There is plenty of scope for changes here. 

Yes—but what about the cavalry? Surely they must have a 
longer term of service?—This is certainly desirable if one is 
dealing with recruits who can neither ride nor tend a horse. But 
there is plenty of scope for changes here too. If the horse rations 
were not so meagerly proportioned—the horses have to be 
specially fed for the manoeuvres in order to attain their normal 
strength!—and if every squadron had a number of extra horses 
available so that the men were able to practise in the saddle more 
often and for longer periods—in short, if a serious effort were 
made to compensate for the shorter term of service by the more 
intensive pursuit of essentials and the elimination of things 
superfluous, it would soon be found that it is possible to manage 
in that way, too. Even for rough-riding, on which so much stress 
has been placed and the vital necessity of which I readily concede, 
ways and means can be found. And anyway there is nothing to 
prevent the retention and extension of the system of three or 
four-year volunteers or of re-enlisted soldiers for cavalry troops, 
for as long as it is considered necessary—in return for corre- 
sponding compensations in the service liability of the reserve and 
the Landwehr, without which such things will not be attained. 

Of course, if one listens to the military authorities one hears 
quite a different tale. It is all quite impossible, they say, and 

Can Europe Disarm? 377 

nothing may be altered without everything collapsing. But for fifty 
years now I have heard so many military institutions solemnly 
described as unassailable and sacrosanct today, only to see them 
flung mercilessly into the junk room tomorrow, and by the very 
same authorities; furthermore, I have so often seen that what is 
praised to the skies in one army is deemed beneath contempt in 
another; I have so often observed that customs lavished with 
praise and institutions of long standing prove to be folly in the 
face of the enemy; finally, it has so often been my experience that 
in every army there is a particular conventional tradition intended 
for those of minor rank, the common soldier and the public, that 
is cultivated by the higher superiors but ridiculed by the officers 
of independent mind and reduced to nought by every campaign— 
in short, I have had so much historical experience of this that I 
would advise everyone to distrust nothing more than military 
“expertise”. 

III 

It is a peculiar contrast: our high-ranking soldiers are generally 
so dreadfully conservative precisely in their own field, and yet 
there is today scarcely any other domain that is as revolutionary as 
the military one. The smooth-bore six-pounder and the seven- 
pound howitzer which I handled close by the Kupfergraben in the 
old days and today’s rifled breech-loading guns, the large- 
calibre smooth-bore gun of those days and the modern 5mm 
repeating breech-loaders, seem centuries apart; and there is still 
no end to it, every day technology still ruthlessly throws overboard 
all the latest innovations. Now it is even discarding the romantic 
powder-smoke, giving battle a totally different character and 
course that are quite incalculable in advance. We must, however, 
increasingly come to terms with such incalculable factors in the 
midst of this ceaseless revolutionising of the technical basis of 
warfare. 

As late as forty years ago the effective firing range of the 
infantry extended no further than 300 paces, at which distance a 
single man could survive unscathed a volley from an entire 
battalion, provided that the men were all really aiming at him. As 
for the firing range of the field artillery, it was practically 
ineffectual even at 1,500 to 1,800 paces. In the Franco-Prussian 
War the effective firing range of the rifles was 600-1,000 paces, 
that of the artillery 3,000-4,000 paces at the most. But the new 

small-bore rifles, as yet untried in war, have a range approaching 
that of the artillery, their projectiles have four to six times the 
penetration; the repeating rifle gives a section today the same 
firepower that a whole company used to have; the artillery, while 
it cannot boast of a similar increase in firing range, has loaded its 
shells with entirely new explosives of previously unheard-of effect; 
though admittedly it is not yet quite certain who will have to suffer 
this effect, the shooter or the shot-at. 

And in the midst of this unceasing, ever accelerating revolution- 
isation of the whole military system we are faced with military 
authorities who five years ago were still drumming into their 
troops all the conventional ceremonies and artificial contortions of 
old Fritz’s* linear tactics, which vanished from the battlefield long 
ago, and continued to revere regulations by which you could still 
be beaten because you had marched off to the right and there was 
no room to form up on the left! Authorities who to this very day 
dare not question the shiny buttons and metal fittings of the 
soldiers’ equipment—just as many magnets to attract 5mm 
bullets—who send the Uhlans into action with broad red doublets, 
and the cuirassiers admittedly without cuirasses—at last!—but in 
white battledress, and have only decided after much _heart- 
searching to sacrifice on the altar of the fatherland the epaulettes 
(which were all the more sacred for being in such appalling 
taste)—rather than the epaulette-bearer himself. 

It seems to me that it is neither in the interest of the German 
people, nor of the German army that this conservative superstition 
remains in control of the army amidst the technical revolution 
surging all around it. We need fresher, bolder minds, and I would 
be very much mistaken if there were not plenty of these among 
our most capable officers, plenty longing to be liberated from the 
routine and the pedantry which has again run riot in the last twenty 
years of peace. But until they find the courage and the opportunity 
to assert their convictions, the rest of us will have to step into the 
breach and do our best to prove that we too learnt something in the 
army. 

Furthermore I have attempted to demonstrate above that the 
two-year term of service can be put into practice now in all arms 
of the service if the men are taught what they need to know in 
war and are spared the traditional time-consuming antiquities. But 
I stated right from the outset that it should not stop at two years. 
Rather, the proposal for an international two-year term of service 

a Frederick II.— Ed. 

Can Europe Disarm? 379 

should be seen as simply the first step towards a gradual further 
reduction in the term of service—say, eighteen months to begin 
with, two summers and a winter—then a year—then...? This is 
where the state of the future starts, the unadulterated militia 
system, and we shall return to this once the thing has really been 
set in motion. 

And this, setting the thing in motion, is most important of all. If 
one first faces the fact that the reduction of the term of service is 
a necessity for the economic existence of all countries and for the 
preservation of European peace, the next gain to be made is the 
realisation that the stress in military training should be placed on the 
education of youth. 

When I returned to the Rhine after ten years’ exile,”*” I was 
pleasantly surprised to see parallel and horizontal bars set up 
everywhere in the yards of the village schools. So far, so good: 
unfortunately it did not go very far. The apparatus was acquired 
in accordance with instructions, in the good old Prussian manner, 
but when it came to using it there was always some sort of 
obstacle. That was a different kettle of fish entirely—ain fact, it 
usually never came to it at all. Is it too much to ask that the whole 
business should be taken seriously at last? That school pupils of all 
classes should be taught gymnastics both with and _ without 
apparatus systematically and thoroughly while their limbs are still 
elastic and supple, instead of, as now, making twenty-year-old lads 
slave away in vain in the sweat of their brows—and one’s own—in 
order to make their stiffened bones, muscles and ligaments loose 
and pliant once again? Any doctor will tell you that the division of 
labour deforms any human being subjected to it, whole series of 
muscles being developed at the expense of others, and that the 
effects of this vary according to the specific branch of labour, each 
job producing its own deformity. Is it not then madness first to let 
the men become deformed and then afterwards make them 
straight and mobile again in the army? Does it demand a degree 
of insight surpassing the official horizon to see that one will obtain 
soldiers that are three times as good if one guards against this 
deformation at the appropriate time, at elementary school and 
secondary college? 

But this is only the beginning. A boy can be taught the 
formation and movement of a serried troop at school with ease. 
The schoolboy stands and walks straight by nature, particularly 
when he has physical training; during our military service every 
one of us has observed the way our recruits stand and how hard it 
is to teach many of them to walk and stand straight. The 

movements in column and company can be trained at any school 
and with a facility unknown in the army. What is a detested, often 
almost insurmountable difficulty for the recruit is a game and a 
diversion for the schoolboy. The contact and sense of direction in 
frontal marching and wheeling which is so difficult to attain with 
adult recruits is easily learnt by schoolboys as soon as drill is 
systematically carried out with them. If a good part of the summer 
is devoted to marches and exercises in the field, the minds and 
bodies of the boys will derive no less benefit from it than the 
military coffers, which will thus save whole months of service time. 
Military rambles of this kind are particularly well suited for getting 
the boys to solve such problems as are encountered on active 
service, and this in turn is highly apt to develop the pupils’ 
intelligence and enable them to acquire a specifically military 
training in a comparatively short time. The practical proof of this 
has been provided by my old friend Beust, himself a former 
Prussian officer, at his school in Zurich. With the present 
complicated state of military matters, a transition to the militia 
system is inconceivable without preparatory military training for 
young people, and it is precisely in this field that Beust’s successful 
experiments are of the greatest importance. 

And now permit me to strike a specifically Prussian note. The 
vital question of concern to the Prussian state is: what is to become 
of the non-commissioned officer who has served his time? Until 
now he has been used as a policeman, frontier guard, doorkeeper, 
clerk, as a civil servant of every conceivable kind; there is not a 
single slot in the Prussian bureaucracy, however humble, that has 
not been filled with non-commissioned officers with a claim to a 
government appointment. Well then: you have worked your 
fingers to the bone to find situations for the non-commissioned 
officers; you have insisted on thrusting them in where they are no 
good, and using them for things of which they know nothing; is it 
not about time they were found a place in the field with which 
they are familiar and in which they can perform a useful job? 
They should become schoolmasters, but not in reading, writing 
and arithmetic—let them teach gymnastics and drill. That will do 
them and the boys good. And once the non-commissioned officers 
are transferred from the secrecy of the barracks and military 
jurisdiction into the daylight of the schoolyard and civil criminal 
procedure, I bet our rebellious school pupils will soon teach even 
the worst parade-ground despot good manners. 

Can Europe Disarm? 381 

IV 

We reserve the right to return to the question of whether such a 
proposal for a universal, equal and gradual reduction in the term 
of service has any prospect of being adopted by international 
treaty. For the time being let us proceed from the assumption that 
it has been adopted. Will it then be translated from paper into 
reality, will it be honestly carried out by all parties? 

Certainly, in the main. Firstly, it will not be possible to keep 
secret a way of evading it that is in any respect worth the trouble. 
And _ secondly, the population itself will ensure that it is 
implemented. No one remains in the barracks of his own free will 
if he is kept there beyond the period prescribed by law. 

As far as individual countries are concerned, Austria and Italy, 
as well as the second and third-rank states that have introduced 
universal military service, will welcome such a treaty as an act of 
liberation and will happily adhere to it in every detail. We shall 
discuss Russia in the next section. But what about France? And in 
this matter France is quite definitely the decisive country. 

Once France has signed and ratified the treaty there can be no 
doubt that it will have, by and large, to keep to it. But let us admit 
that the revanchist tendency existing in the propertied classes and 
the part of the working class that is not yet socialist may win the 
upper hand for a moment and provoke infringements of the 
treaty limits, either direct or based on hair-splitting. Such 
infringements can, however, never be of any importance, for 
otherwise Paris would prefer to abrogate the treaty. But Germany 
is in the fortunate position of being able generously to turn a 
blind eye to such minor cheating. Despite all the very commend- 
able efforts of France to render a repetition of the defeats of 1870 
impossible, Germany is much further ahead of it than is evident at 
first glance. Firstly there is the annually growing gap between the 
populations, now amounting to more than 12 million in Ger- 
many’s favour. Secondly, the fact that the present military system 
has been in existence in Prussia for more than seventy years; the 
population has grown accustomed to it; it has been tested in every 
detail in a long series of mobilisations; all the problems that may 
arise and the mode of solving them have been experienced in 
practice and are familiar—advantages from which the other 
German armies also benefit. In France, however, general mobilisa- 
tion still has to be tried out, and with an organisation that, for this 
purpose, is much more complicated. Thirdly, however, the 
undemocratic institution of one-year volunteers has encountered 

insuperable obstacles in France; the three-year soldiers have 
simply ousted the one-year privileged ones from the army by 
means of chicanery. This proves how far public political conscious- 
ness in Germany, and the political institutions tolerated by it, lag 
behind those of France. But the political shortcoming is in this 
case a military advantage. It is beyond all doubt that no country, 
in relation to its population, sends such a number of young people 
through its secondary and high schools as Germany, and so the 
institution of one-year volunteers, undemocratic and_ politically 
objectionable though it may be, provides the army command with 
an excellent means of giving the majority of these young people 
(who have already received an adequate all-round training) a 
military training for service as officers. The campaign of 1866 first 
illustrated this, but since then, and particularly since 1871, this 
aspect of Germany’s military strength has been specially fostered, 
indeed almost to excess. And even if so many of the German 
reserve officers have recently been doing their best to make their 
rank a laughing stock, there is still no doubt that as a body they 
are militarily superior, man for man, to their French counterparts, 
and, most importantly, that among its reservists and territorials 
Germany possesses a much higher percentage of men qualified for 
service as officers than any other country. 

This peculiar abundance of officers enables Germany to muster 
a disproportionately larger number of new formations, already 
trained in peacetime, than any other country. According to the 
claim made by Richter (Freisinnige Zeitung, November 26, 1892 ***), 
which as far as I know has not been refuted either in the 
Reichstag or in the military commission, each German infantry regi- 
ment will be able to provide a mobile reserve regiment, two batta- 
lions of Landwehr and two Ersatzreserve battalions for action in war. 
Thus every three battalions provide ten, or the 519 battalions of 
the 173 peacetime regiments turn into 1,730 battalions in war- 
time, not counting riflemen and gunners. And in such a short time 
that no other country is able to come even remotely near it. 

The French reserve officers, as one of them admitted to me, are 
much less numerous; yet they are supposed to be sufficient to fill 
the posts of the new formations envisaged by official publications. 
What is more, this man confessed that half of these officers are 
not of much use. The new formations in question are, however, a 
long way from equalling what Germany is said to be capable of 
achieving. And even so, the officers that France is able to muster 
will by then all have been used, while Germany will still be keeping 
some of them in reserve. 

Can Europe Disarm? 383 

In all wars hitherto there has been a lack of officers after a 
couple of months of campaigning. With all other countries this 
would still be the case even today. Germany alone has an 
inexhaustible supply of officers. This being so, should we not be 
able to turn a blind eye to it if the French occasionally drill their 
men two or three weeks longer than stipulated in the treaty? 

Vv 

We now come to Russia. Frankly speaking, it makes little 
difference whether Russia adheres to a treaty on the gradual equal 
reduction of the term of service, or even enters into one at all. In 
fact, as far as the issue at hand is concerned, we can disregard 
Russia almost entirely, for reasons given below. 

Although the Russian Empire embraces over a hundred million 
people, easily twice as many as the German Empire, it is far from 
possessing an offensive military force anywhere near that of 
Germany. The fifty million people of Germany are huddled 
together over an area of 540,000 square kilometres; the at most 90 
to 100 million people in Russia that come into consideration for us 
militarily are dispersed over 3’/: million square kilometres, at a 
moderate estimate; the advantage accruing to the Germans on 
account of this far greater density of population is enhanced even 
further by the incomparably better railway network. In spite of 
this, the fact remains that a hundred million can in the long run 
provide more soldiers than fifty. As things stand it will take quite a 
long time before they come; but they are bound to come 
eventually. What then? 

An army needs not only recruits but also officers. And in this 
respect the position in Russia looks pretty bad. In Russia only the 
nobility and the citizenry of the towns are considered for the rank 
of officer. The nobility is comparatively very small in numbers; 
there are few towns—one man in ten at most lives in a town—and 
of these towns only very few indeed merit the name. The number 
of secondary schools and of the pupils attending them is 
exceedingly small. Where are the officers for all the rank-and-file 
troops supposed to come from? 

One man’s meat is another man’s poison. The system of 
universal military service presupposes a certain degree of 
economic and intellectual development; where this is lacking the 
system does more harm than good. And this is obviously the case 
in Russia. 

First, it takes a comparatively long time anyway to make a 
trained soldier out of the average Russian recruit. The Russian 
soldier is of unquestionable bravery. As long as the attack by 
serried ranks of infantry was tactically decisive, he was in his 
element. His entire experience of life had led him to rely on the 
union with his comrades. In the villages, the semi-communistic 
community, in the towns, the cooperative work of the artel,**” 
everywhere the krugovaya poruka, the mutual liability of the 
comrades; in short, a state of society that palpably points to 
cohesion, the fount of all salvation, on the one hand, and the 
powerless solitude of the isolated individual left to his own 
initiative, on the other. The Russian retains this character even in 
the army; the massed battalions are almost impossible to break up, 
the greater the danger, the harder the lumps cluster together. But 
this instinct to close ranks, which was still of inestimable value at 
the time of the Napoleonic campaigns and compensated for a 
good many less useful aspects of the Russian soldier, is today a 
definite danger. Today the masses in closed ranks have disap- 
peared from the battle-line, today it is a matter of holding 
together dispersed bands of infantrymen, in which troops from 
the most diverse units are all mixed up and command often and 
rapidly enough switches to officers who are completely unknown 
to most of the men; today every soldier must be able to do what 
has to be done at any particular moment on his own, though 
without losing his sense of belonging to the whole. This sense of 
cohesion cannot be facilitated through the primitive herd instinct 
of the Russian but only by developing the intelligence of each 
individual. The essential conditions for this can only be found at a 
stage of civilisation marked by higher “individualistic” develop- 
ment, such as that existing in the capitalist nations of the West. 
The small-bore repeating breech-loader and low-smoke powder 
have transformed the quality which was hitherto the greatest 
strength of the Russian army into one of its greatest weaknesses. 
Thus nowadays it will take even longer than before to make the 
Russian recruit into a soldier fit for battle, and he will no longer 
be able to match the soldiers of the West at all. 

But secondly: where are the officers to come from to give all 
these new formations a framework in wartime? If even France is 
having trouble finding a sufficient number of officers, how will 
Russia manage? Russia, where the educated population, which 
alone can supply competent officers, constitutes such a dispropor- 

a Engels’ transliteration of the Russian words.— Ed. 

Can Europe Disarm? 385 

tionately small percentage of the total, and yet the soldiers, even 
the trained soldiers, need a larger percentage of officers than in 
other armies? 

And thirdly: with the notorious, widespread system of embezzle- 
ment and theft on the part of the civil servants in Russia, and all 
too often the officers too, how is a mobilisation supposed to take 
place? In all previous Russian wars it immediately turned out that 
even part of the peacetime army and its stocks of equipment 
existed only on paper. How will they manage, then, when the 
reservists on leave and the opoltschenie* (Landwehr) are to join 
their units and be equipped with uniforms, arms and ammunition? 
Unless everything goes off smoothly during mobilisation, unless 
everything is available at the right time and in the right place, 
there is utter confusion. But how is everything to go off smoothly 
if everything passes through the hands of thieving, corrupt 
Russian tschinowniks? The Russian mobilisation—that will be a 
show fit for the Gods! 

All things considered: for purely military reasons.alone, we can 
allow the Russians to call up as many soldiers and to keep them 
with the colours as long as the Tsar sees fit. Apart from the troops 
who are already under arms he will hardly be able to put many 
more on their feet, and hardly at the right time. The experiment 
with universal military service may cost Russia dear. 

And then, if it comes to war, all along the border from Kovno 
to Kaminiets the Russian army will be in enemy country right 
there on her own soil, amidst Poles and Jews, the Tsarist 
government even having made mortal enemies of the Jews. The 
moment Russia loses a couple of battles the battlefield will be 
pushed back from the Vistula to the Dvina and the Dnieper; in 
the rear of the German army, under its protection, an army of 
Polish allies will be formed; and it will be a just punishment for 
Prussia if it is then compelled to restore a strong Poland to ensure 
its own safety. 

Up to now we have only considered the directly military 
conditions, finding that Russia can be disregarded as far as the 
present issue is concerned. This will become even more evident, 
however, as soon aS we cast a glance at the overall economic 
situation, and particularly the financial position, in Russia. 

a Engels’ transliteration of the Russian word.— Ed. 
b Engels’ transliteration of the Russian word meaning “civil servants”.— Ed. 

VI 

The internal situation in Russia is almost desperate at the 
moment. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the 
development of large-scale capitalist industry related to it, partly as 
cause, partly as effect, have hurled this, the stablest of all 
countries, this European China, into an economic and _ social 
revolution which is now proceeding inexorably on its way; and its 
progress is, for the time being, overwhelmingly devastating. 

At the time of the emancipation, the nobility rece1ved compensa- 
tion in state loan bonds, which they spent in revelry as fast as 
they could. When this was accomplished, the new railways opened 
up a market for the wood from their forest for them; they had the 
timber cut and sold and once again lived in splendour and 
pleasure as long as the proceeds lasted. The management of the 
estates under the new conditions and with free workers generally 
remained most unsatisfactory; littke wonder that the landowning 
Russian nobility are up to their ears in debt, if not utterly 
bankrupt, and that the produce yielded by their estates is 
decreasing rather than increasing. 

The peasant generally received worse land, and less of it, than 
he had owned until then; he lost the right to common grazing and 
the use of the forest, and hence the basis for rearing livestock. 
Taxes were raised considerably, and now had to be paid by him 
personally in cash, everywhere; on top of this there were the 
instalments—also in cash—to pay off the interest and capital on 
the redemption money advanced by the state (wykup)*. In short, 
the deterioration of his overall economic position was aggravated 
by his suddenly being forcibly removed from a_ subsistence 
farming economy and being placed in a money economy, which is 
alone enough to ruin the peasantry of a country. The result of this 
was the luxuriant development of the exploitation of the peasants 
by the rural money-owners, well-to-do farmers and pot-house 
landlords, mirojedy (literally “community eaters”) and kulaki? 
(usurers). And as if that were not enough, along came modern 
large-scale industry and ruined the subsistence economy of the 
peasants to the very last bit. Not only did its competition 
undermine the domestic industrial production of the peasant for 
his own wants, it also took away the market for his handicrafts 
intended for sale, or placed it, at best, under the sway of the 
capitalist “entrepreneur” or, even worse, his middleman. The 

a Engels’ transliteration of the Russian words.— Ed. 

Can Europe Disarm? 387 

Russian peasant, with his primeval agriculture and his old 
communistic community system, was thus suddenly brought into 
collision with the most advanced form of modern large-scale 
industry, which had to forcibly acquire a domestic market; a 
situation in which he was irredeemably bound to perish. But the 
peasant comprised almost nine-tenths of the population of Russia, 
and the ruin of the peasant was synonymous with the—at least 
temporary—ruin of Russia.* 

After this process of social upheaval had been going on 
for about twenty years, other results emerged too. The ruthless 
deforestation destroyed the stocks of subsoil water, the rain and 
snow water flowed quickly away along the streams and rivers 
without being absorbed, producing serious floods; but in summer 
the rivers became shallow and the ground dried out. In many of 
the most fertile areas of Russia the level of subsoil water is said to 
have dropped a full metre, so that the roots of the corn crops can 
no longer reach it and wither away. So that not only are the 
human beings ruined, but in many areas so is the land itself for at 
least a generation. 

This hitherto chronic process of ruination was rendered acute 
and thus visible to the whole world by the famine of 1891. And 
for this reason Russia has not managed to escape from famine 
since 1891. That bad year largely ruined the peasants’ last and 
most important means of production—livestock—and drove their 
indebtedness to such heights that it is bound to crush their last 
powers of resistance. 

In a position like this a country could do no more than embark 
on a war of desperation. But even the means for this are lacking. 
In Russia the nobility lives on debts, the peasant now also lives on 
debts, and the state, especially, lives on debts. The amount of 
money owed by the Russian state abroad is known: over four 
thousand million marks. The amount it owes at home is known to 
no one; firstly, because neither the total of the loans raised. nor 
that of the paper-money in circulation is known and, secondly, 
because the value of this paper-money changes every day. But one 
thing is certain: Russia’s credit abroad is exhausted. The four 
thousand million marks of the Russian national debt bonds have 
glutted the Western European money market to bursting point. 

* I set forth all this a year ago in the Neue Zeit 1891/92, No. 19, in the article 
“Socialism in Germany”. 

a See this volume, pp. 246-50.— Ed. 

England got rid of most of her “Russians” long ago, and Germany 
has recently done so. Holland and France have ruined their 
digestion by purchasing them, as was evident from the last Russian 
loan in Paris: only 300 of the 500 million francs could be placed, 
and the Russian minister of finance had to take back 200 million 
from the subscribing and oversubscribing bankers.*”” This consti- 
tutes proof of the fact that there is no prospect whatever of a new 
Russian loan in the immediate future, not even in France. 

This is the position of the country which is said to be 
threatening us with the imminent risk of war and yet is even 
unable to get a war of desperation off the ground unless we are 
stupid enough to toss the money for it into its jaws ourselves. 

The ignorance of the French government and the French 
bourgeois public opinion that controls it is incomprehensible. It is 
not France that needs Russia—rather it is Russia that needs 
France. Without France, the Tsar and his policy would be isolated 
in Europe; powerless he would have to let everything in the West 
and the Balkans take its course. With a litthke common sense France 
could squeeze as much out of Russia as it wanted to. But instead, 
the French authorities are grovelling prostrate before the Tsar. 

Russia’s wheat exports have already been ruined by cheaper 
American competition. This leaves only rye as its chief export 
commodity, and this goes almost exclusively to Germany. The 
moment Germany starts eating white bread instead of black bread, the 
present, official Tsarist-big-bourgeois Russia will go bankrupt. 

vil 

We have now sufficiently criticised our neighbouring, placid 
enemies. But what are things like at home? 

Well, to put it bluntly: a gradual reduction in the term of service 
can only be to the advantage of the army if an end is put once 
and for all to maltreatment of soldiers which has gained ground in 
recent years and become the rule in the army, far more than 
people care to admit. 

This maltreatment is the counterpart of square-bashing and 
parade drill; both have always spread in the Prussian army as soon 
as it becomes a peacetime army for a while, and from the 
Prussians it is passed on to the Saxons, Bavarians, etc. It is a legacy 
from the genuine “Old Prussian” age, when the soldier was either 
an enlisted ragamuffin or the son of a bond peasant, and 
therefore had to put up with every form of ill-treatment and 

Can Europe Disarm? 389 

degradation from his Junker officer without a murmur. And 
particularly the down-at-heel nobility of starvelings and spongers, 
which is by no means under-represented east of the Elbe, still 
provides its share of the worst tormentors even today, and is only 
equalled in this respect by the snobbish little sons of the 
bourgeoisie eager to play the Junker. 

The browbeating of the soldier has never entirely died out in 
the Prussian army. But it used to be rarer, more lenient and at 
times more humorous. But then, on the one hand, it became 
necessary to teach the soldier more and more, while, on the other 
hand, nobody thought of abolishing the useless debris of 
outmoded tactical drills, which had become meaningless. From this 
time on, the non-commissioned officer increasingly received tacit 
authorisation to adopt any method of training which he deemed 
suitable. Furthermore he was indirectly constrained to employ 
forcible means by the order to drum one thing or another into his 
squad with a satisfactory result in a limited period. On top of all 
this, the soldier’s right of complaint is a downright mockery—no 
wonder the favourite Old Prussian method came into vogue again 
wherever the soldiers put up with it. For I am certain that there is 
much less tormenting of soldiers in the regiments of the West or 
those with a strong admixture of city-dwellers than in those which 
are chiefly made up of country people from east of the Elbe. 

There used to be a means of counterbalancing this, at least in 
practice. With the smooth-bore muzzle-loader it was a simple 
matter to drop a pebble down the barrel onto the blank cartridge 
during manoeuvres, and it was by no means unusual for hated 
superiors to be accidentally shot during manoeuvres. Sometimes it 
went wrong as well: I knew a young man from Cologne who was 
killed in this way in 1849, by a shot that was intended for his 
captain. Now, with the small-bore breech-loader it is no longer 
possible to do this so easily and unobtrusively; for this reason, the 
army suicide statistics indicate to us the barometric level of soldier 
tormenting fairly accurately. But if the live cartridge is put to use 
in ‘serious cases”, there is certainly every reason to wonder 
whether the old practice is again finding its advocates, as is said to 
have happened here and there in recent wars; though of course 
that would not contribute much to victory.*”' 

The reports of English officers are unanimous in praising the 
exceptionally good relations between superiors and soldiers in the 
French army on manoeuvres in Champagne in 1891. Such things 
as so often leak out of the barracks and into the press in our 
country would be quite impossible in this army. Even before the 

Great Revolution the attempt to introduce Prussian flogging with 
rods failed. Even at the worst moment of the Algerian campaigns 
and the Second Empire, no superior would have dared treat the 
French soldiers anything like as badly as the German soldier is 
treated before our very eyes. And today, after the introduction of 
universal compulsory military service, I should like to see the 
French non-commissioned officer who would venture to order the 
soldiers to box each other’s ears or spit in each other’s faces. But 
what scorn the French soldiers must feel for their future 
adversaries when they hear and read what they submit to without 
turning a hair. And every care is taken to ensure that the men in 
French barracks do read and hear all about it. 

In the French army there prevails the spirit and relationship 
between officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers that 
prevailed in Prussia from 1813 to 1815, and twice took our 
soldiers to Paris. In our own country, however, the state of affairs 
is fast approaching that of 1806, when the soldier was hardly even 
considered a human being, and was flogged and tormented, when 
there was an unbridgeable gulf between him and the officer—and 
this state of affairs led the army to Jena*” and into French 
captivity. . 

There is a lot of talk about the decisive value of morale in war. 
Yet what else is done in peacetime but to destroy it almost 
systematically? 

Vill 

So far we have assumed that the proposal for a gradual, equal 
reduction in the term of service with an ultimate transition to the 
militia system has been universally adopted. But the main question 
is: will it be adopted? 

Let us assume that Germany first puts the proposal to Austria, 
Italy and France. Austria will gladly accept a maximum term of 
service of two years and will probably reduce it even further in 
actual practice. In the Austrian army it seems that there is far less 
reticence than in the German army to talk about the fact that the 
short term of service of some troops has been a success. Many 
officers there state quite bluntly that the Landwehr, which only 
serves for a few months, is a better troop than the line; one thing 
in their favour, at any rate, I am assured, is that a Landwehr 
battalion can mobilise in 24 hours, while a battalion of the line 
requires several days. Naturally: in the line they are afraid to 

Can Europe Disarm? 391 

infringe on the casual old Austrian arrogance; in the Landwehr, 
where all the institutions are newly created, they have, however, 
had the guts not to introduce it. At any rate, both the people and 
the government of Austria are longing for an alleviation of the 
military burden, which is most easily obtainable here by reducing 
the term of service, precisely on account of their own experience. 

Italy will likewise grasp the opportunity with both hands. It is 
succumbing under the pressure of the military budget to such a 
degree that the help must be brought in, and soon. Here, too, 
reduction of the maximum term of service is the shortest and 
easiest way. One may thus say: either the Triple Alliance*” will 
come to grief or it will have to adopt a method that is more or less 
tantamount to our proposal. 

But if Germany, supported by the acceptance of Austria and 
Italy, puts this proposal to the French government, the latter will 
be placed in a very awkward position. If it accepts the proposal, it 
will certainly not be making its relative military position any worse. 
On the contrary, it would have the opportunity of improving this 
relative position. In some respects it is a disadvantage for France 
that universal compulsory military service was only introduced 
there 20 years ago. But this disadvantage entails the advantage 
that everything is still new, that the pigtail of yore has only 
recently been chopped off, that further improvements can easily 
be introduced without coming up against the stubborn resistance 
of ingrained prejudices. All armies are immensely capable of 
development after major defeats. Better utilisation of the term of 
service laid down by treaty vould therefore be far easier to put 
into effect in France than elsewhere. Moreover, since the 
educational system is also in a state of revolutionisation, just like 
the army, it will be possible to put the all-round physical (and 
particularly the military) training of young people into operation 
far more rapidly and more easily there than elsewhere. But this 
would mean a strengthening in the military position of France 
vis-a-vis that of Germany. In spite of all this, it is possible and 
indeed even probable that the chauvinist tendency— French 
chauvinism is just as stupid as the German variety—will be strong 
enough to bring down any government that adopts any such 
thing, particularly if it hails from Germany. So let us assume that 
France refuses. What then? 

Then, by the simple fact of having made this proposal, Germany 
will have gained a tremendous advantage. We should not forget: 
the twenty-seven years of Bismarckian rule have made Germany 
hated in all countries—not without justification. Neither the 

27* 

annexation of the North Schleswig Danes, nor the breaking and 
subsequent juggling away of the Prague Peace Treaty article 
relating to it,”* nor the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, nor the 
petty-minded measures against the Prussian Poles, had anything at 
all to do with restoration of the “national unity”. Bismarck has 
managed to give Germany the reputation of being greedy for 
territory; the chauvinist German burgher who threw out the 
German Austrians and yet still desires to hold Germany fraternally 
together above everything “from the Etsch to the Memel’,* but 
would like to unite Holland, Flanders, Switzerland and the 
allegedly “German” Baltic provinces of Russia with the German 
Empire—this German chauvinist has given Bismarck every possi- 
ble assistance, and with such splendid success that not a single 
person in Europe trusts the “honest Germans” any more. 
Wherever you care to go, you will find everywhere sympathy for 
France and distrust of Germany, which is regarded as the cause of 
the present war danger. There would be an end to all this if 
Germany decided to put forward our proposal. It would be acting 
aS a peacemaker in a manner that left no room for doubt. It 
would be declaring its willingness to lead the way in the work of 
disarmament, as rightly befits the country that gave the signal for 
armament. Distrust would turn into trust, aversion into sympathy. 
Not only would the saying that the Triple Alliance is an alliance 
for peace finally become a reality—so would the Triple Alliance 
itself, which at present is a mere pretence. All public opinion in 
Europe and America would take sides with Germany. And that 
would be a moral conquest which would amply outweigh even any 
military disadvantages in our proposal that could possibly be 
thought out. 

France, on the other hand, having turned down the disarma- 
ment proposal, would slip into the same unfavourable position of 
suspicion now occupied by Germany. Now we all see, the 
European philistine would say—and it is he who is the greatest 
great power—now we all see who wants peace and who wants war. 
And if a really warlike government should one day take the helm 
in France, it would be faced with a situation that with a little sense 
would positively prohibit war. No matter how it went about it, it 
would stand before the whole of Europe as the party that had 
precipitated, indeed generated the war. Thus it would not only 
have prejudiced the small countries against it, and England too; it 
would not even be sure of the aid of Russia, not even the 

a A paraphrase of Lied der Deutschen by Hoffmann von Fallersleben.— Ed. 

Can Europe Disarm? 393 

traditional Russian aid that consists of first getting its allies into 
trouble and then leaving them in the lurch. 

Let us not forget: the next war will be decided by England. The 
Triple Alliance at war with Russia and France, as well as France, 
separated from Russia by enemy territory, are all dependent on 
sea transport for the large grain imports which are indispensable 
to them. England is absolute master of the sea. If it places its navy 
at the disposal of one side, the other will simply be starved into 
submission, its grain supplies being cut off; it will be the starvation 
of Paris on an immensely larger scale, and the side that is 
starved out will have to surrender, as sure as two and two are 
four. 

All right then: at the moment the Liberal tendency has the 
upper hand in England, and the English Liberals have distinct 
French sympathies. Moreover, old Gladstone is personally a 
Russophile. If a European war breaks out, England will remain 
neutral as long as possible; but in the above-mentioned cir- 
cumstances even her “benevolent” neutrality may be of decisive 
help to one of the warring parties. If Germany puts forward our 
proposal and it is rejected by France, Germany will not only have 
overcome all English sympathies opposed to it, and assured itself 
of England’s benevolent neutrality; it will also have made it 
virtually impossible for the English government to join the war on 
the side of Germany’s opponents. 

So, in conclusion: 

Either France accepts the proposal. Then the risk of war arising 
out of ever-increasing armaments will really have been removed, 
the peoples will come to rest and Germany will enjoy the glory for 
having initiated this. 

Or France does not accept. It will then make its own position in 
Europe worse and Germany’s better, to such an extent that 
Germany will no longer need to fear a war at all and will even be 
able to proceed to gradually reduce the term of service and pave 
the way for the militia system off its own bat and free of danger in 
collaboration with its allies, who will only then truly be its allies. 

Will it have the courage to take the step towards deliverance? Or 
will it wait until France, enlightened as to the position of Russia, 
takes the first step and reaps the credit for itself? 

394