Industrialization of War, 1840–84 255after 1870 a character of their own, noticeably offset from the ethos of
long-service troops, who had dominated the scene before the Ger
mans showed what citizen-soldiers, commanded by professional of
ficers, could do.^44
All this accorded oddly with the changeability and growing me
chanical complexity of industrial society. The routine simplicity of
army life dictated standardized weaponry and ritualized drill. Even the
expertness of the General Staff, which had brought the Prussians such
striking rewards between 1864 and 1871, began to exhibit technologi
cal rigidity in the aftermath of their triumph over the French. Other
European armies equaled, or in Britain’s case exceeded, the Germans
in resisting technical change. Though private arms makers did all they
could to peddle heavy artillery and machine guns to the world’s ar
mies, they met with slow and reluctant response. What use were guns
too heavy for horses to pull? How could machine guns, spitting hun
dreds of bullets a minute, find an adequate diet of ammunition on the
battlefield? Delivery systems from the railhead were already inade
quate, after all, as the Franco-Prussian War had demonstrated anew.
Adding to the strain seemed senseless, and justified stalwart resistance
to the wiles of arms salesmen who kept on proffering new and expen
sive weapons to reluctant officers and officials.
Cordial dislike prevailed between private arms makers and their
official customers in every country of Europe. Yet, after 1870, each
needed the other: arsenals were simply not equipped to produce steel
guns, and the costs of fitting them out to do so were politically un
acceptable. Hence, even in countries with the most technically pro
ficient state arsenals, weapons made of steel had to be purchased from
private manufacturers. The French had paid the price of relying on
arsenal-made bronze artillery in 1870; the British, too, saw the giant
muzzle-loading guns produced at the Woolwich arsenal fall decisively
behind the performance of breech-loading models available from
- I have not found a persuasive analysis of European armies’ sociopsychological
pattern in the pre-World War I era. The above remarks derive largely from personal
experience of the American army in World War II, where, of course, an aristocratic
officer corps was lacking. But cf. Martin Kitchen, The German Officer Corps, 1890–1914
(Oxford, 1968); Girardet, La société militaire, pp. 198–291. The fact that both the
German and British armies were organized into territorially based regiments gave reg
imental esprit de corps a remarkable importance in civil society. Draftees and volun
teers often made lifelong friends during their military service, and renewed contact at
regimental reunions throughout their adult lives. The cameraderie of army life, pro
longed in this way, colored and often dominated local male society, especially in the
countryside, since no other linkages united so many men so strongly. I owe this insight
to personal communication from Professor Michael Howard.