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