254 Chapter SevenThe Prussian victories of 1866 and 1870–71 gave army officers, in
Germany and other leading continental states, a Janus-like role in
society. On the one hand, they were the spiritual and often the bodily
heirs of rural estate owners, accustomed to giving orders to the labor
ers who cultivated their fields. Yet these landlords-in-uniform also
required up-to-date industrial machinery for successful war. For some
forty years this symbiosis of opposites seemed a happy one. In all of
central and eastern Europe—and to some degree also in France—the
military chain of command preserved a human pattern of unques
tioning submission to a social superior which was fast disappearing
from civil society as market relationships multiplied and freedom to
choose which job to take and what to buy extended further and
further down the social hierarchy, from cities to towns, and from
towns to villages, across the face of Europe. Even Russia abolished
serfdom in 1861!
Armies therefore acquired an archaic flavor. This was especially true
of the Prussian pacesetter, for the Prussian officer corps took its col
oration from the Junkers of the east, among whom residues of the old
master-serf relationship lingered long after most of Germany had left
the rural simplicity of a bipolar pattern of society behind. Yet part of
the efficiency of European armies in general, and of the German army
in particular, rested on this archaism. Individuals drafted into the army
found themselves in a simpler society than the one they knew in civil
life. The private soldier lost almost all personal responsibility. Ritual
and routine took care of nearly every waking hour. Simple obedience
to the orders that punctuated that routine from time to time, and set
activity off in some new direction, offered release from the anxieties
inherent in personal decision-making—anxieties that multiplied in
continently in urban society, where rival leaders, rival loyalties, and
practical alternatives as to how to spend at least a part of one’s time
competed insistently for attention. Paradoxical as it may sound, escape
from freedom was often a real liberation, especially among young men
living under very rapidly changing conditions, who had not yet been
able to assume fully adult roles.
From about the middle of the nineteenth century, an officer class
that aped the manners of aristocrats even when of bourgeois birth
coexisted in most of Europe with a rank and file of young draftees who
found obedience an attractive solution to some of the dilemmas of life
in an urbanizing society. This sort of escape from troubling ambiguity,
superimposed on the atavistic resonance with hunting band sociability
that close-order drill continued to arouse, gave continental armies