(^246) Chapter Seven
Maurice of Orange. With a breech-loader, what would prevent an
excited or frightened soldier from wasting his bullets by firing indis
criminately and at top speed until his ammunition was exhausted?
Conversely, what could persuade men lying upon the ground under
enemy fire to get up on their feet again and move about the field of
battle?
Such questions seemed all the more pointed when applied to the
Prussian army, whose rank and file comprised short-term recruits and
whose reserve units—needed to flesh out numbers and bring the Prus
sian army up to Great Power scale—were no more than civilians in
uniform. But reservists’ training and discipline could not possibly
come up to the levels of long-term service troops like those of the
French, Austrian, and Russian armies.
Moreover, the Prussian army of the 1840s and 1850s suffered from
an acutely ambiguous relationship with civil society. The officer corps,
recruited mainly from the trans-Elban aristocracy, was politically reac
tionary. It disliked and distrusted the middle-class entrepreneurs who
had begun to make the Rhinelands and cities like Berlin and Hamburg
into seats of machine production and technical innovation. The revo
lution of 1848 had left a bitter residue. The crowds’ initial successes in
winning control of the streets of Berlin offended and humiliated the
Prussian officer corps, while the unwillingness of the government to
capitalize on its chance to unite Germany alienated all those who
looked to national unification as a panacea for the difficulties and
disappointments of everyday life. Prussian officers feared renewal of
revolution and strove to make the army an effective bulwark of the
hierarchic principle of society upon which their own way of life and, as
they thought, the greatness of the Prussian state depended. Political
reformers, for their part, believed that the Prussian army was readier
to oppose revolution at home than to create the great Germany of
which they dreamed.
Yet the memory of the Befreiungskrieg of 1813–14 haunted both
sides. Patriotic Germans remembered how their fathers and grand
fathers had rallied as a people’s army under the Prussian king’s ban
ners to fight against the French. Prussian officers, too, were well aware
that an effective civilian reserve was essential if Prussia were to play
the role of a great power in war.
In 1858 a new reign began when Wilhelm I became regent for his
demented brother. In the next year, the unification of Italy intensified
nationalist discontent in the Germanies. Wilhelm (king in his own
right, 1861–88) responded by seeking bigger appropriations for the
brent
(Brent)
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