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