X
THE NEW MILITARISM
As I entered Germany through Bavaria, the Government troops, Noske's "Free Corps," were massing for the attack on Munich. One saw them at every station, vigorous young men in the twenties, many of them ex-officers. They had new uniforms. They looked clean and well fed. They bustled about the stations with a brisk air among the listless crowds. They drank wine in the buffets, and in the streets they walked about with girls. They seemed to dominate Germany with their steel helmets and their stick-grenades ready at their belts. I had arrived in time to witness the triumph of law and order. Noske with his 450,000 Volunteers was supreme. Work, to be sure, went no better for their victory. The unemployed still elected Communists to the Workers' Councils. After the Ruhr, the Silesian coal-pits struck. But Noske added victory to victory, and from Munich in due course came the news that the last stronghold of Spartacus had fallen.
I spent an evening some days later in a hospitable "Independent" Socialist house in Berlin. Among the guests were a banker, a count, and a certain Baron S. It was not exactly the company that one expected to meet in a Marxist salon. Of the three, Baron S. interested me particularly. He was once connected with Krupps. His fame as a successful agent of German propaganda used to reach us in telegrams from Athens while King Constantine still reigned. To-day he occupies a post at the seat of power. He is attached in a political capacity to the Free Corps—Noske's anti-revolutionary guard. To me he seemed a man of unusual intelligence and decision. At the moment of Noske's apparent triumph, I was curious to hear how politics looked from the windows of the "Eden Hotel"—for Baron S. had his office in the headquarters of the Corps which murdered Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The replies to my first questions were more than startling. The Corps knew that they had failed. They had started with all manner of boyish and soldierly illusions about the efficacy of force, but already they were weary of the unending work. They rushed to one great town, only to find that a general strike had broken out in another. So soon as one coalfield was "pacified," another "downed tools." With machine guns and hand grenades one can destroy a revolutionary Government, but one cannot force the workers to work. The end of it all will be Bolshevism, declared Baron S. vehemently; there is only one possible alternative. Here I invite the reader to pause, and recollect the speaker's antecedents. The alternative, if you please, was an all-Socialist Government. Noske and Scheidemann must go. They were sham Socialists. The middle-class Ministers must all go. The workers would trust only a Government of Socialists, and work they will not, until they trust the Government. It must embody the Soviets in the Constitution, as a Second Chamber. It must instantly nationalize the mines and the big metal industries. There, perhaps, it might stop short. The workers would believe an all-Socialist Government, if it said that more for the moment was inexpedient. They would not believe a mixed Coalition which refused to nationalize; in that case they drew the conclusion that Erzberger and Dernburg had paralyzed their Socialist colleagues. "But," I asked in amazement, "would the Free Corps allow their creator Noske to be deposed; would they tolerate an all-Socialist Government?" The answer came promptly. "The leaders all agree: they accept my plan." So, then, the pillars of order no longer trust their own stability. They see the necessity at least of a moderate advance into Socialism, and even of a partial adoption of the Soviet system—they would cure Bolshevism by homœopathy. The banker was of the same opinion.
The sequel proves that Baron S. was probably too sanguine in his estimate of the intelligence of the leaders of the Free Corps. The fact was, I think, that the Corps were sharply divided by a feud which was at bottom rather personal and professional than political. Some weeks later, at the Congress of the Majority Socialists, Noske accused the Independents of tampering with the loyalty of his Corps, and endeavoring to arrange a coup d'état. Nothing actually happened, either because the Independent leaders were too prudent to strike before the Treaty of Peace was signed, or because their wiser heads shrank from such questionable allies, perhaps because the Corps were not really in the salutary state of mind of the able and sympathetic Baron S., or else because Noske had offered them better terms.
This accidental glimpse of the under-world of intrigue in Berlin set me thinking. On this occasion the Free Corps had not in fact made a coup d'etat, but if they had been so minded, what was there to stop them? That is not a question which one asks about Germany or any other civilized State in normal times. The officers of the army are usually men more or less satisfied with their professional careers and with their social relaxations and ambitions. If in a monarchical State they are discontented, their loyalty to the sovereign is usually a sufficient restraint. One does not inquire what would happen if they should abuse their monopoly of force, because (in England, for example) the motive which might induce them to abuse it is absent. They are ordinary members of the governing class, and though they commonly belong to its more Conservative Right Wing, and are critical of any "advanced" tendencies which find expression in legislation, there is rarely any challenge to the interests of their class so sharp as to drive them from grumbling to action. In a country which has conscription, the risk of an anti-democratic coup d'état is negligible and I can recall no instance of it. The military revolutions which succeeded in Turkey, in Portugal, and to a limited extent in Greece, when M. Venizelos was first summoned from Crete to guide the work of reform, were all of them in their origins professedly democratic and anti-dynastic movements, and they succeeded only because an advanced group of officers was able to enlist the sympathy of the men. There are other cases (the Boulanger adventure, for example), in which a reactionary movement led by generals, who came near to testing their power, must obviously have failed, because the men on the whole felt with the mass of the civilian nation. In the first revolutions in Russia and Germany, which stopped short with the overthrow of the monarchy, the decisive factor in both cases was that the conscript soldiers or sailors garrisoned in the capital or within easy reach of it broke away from their officers and actively supported the Republican movement. In times of peace it was usually, though not always, the case that the conscripts of the "active" army would fire on riotous strikers at an order from their officers. They were, however, very young men easily intimidated and influenced: experience seems to show that during war, when the bulk of the army is composed of reservists of maturer years, there are limits beyond which discipline does not avail.
It is not, I think, a rash assumption, that in our day, given the hold of Socialism upon the working class in most Continental countries, the officer class could not use the mass of their conscript men to upset a Republican Government or to destroy a Socialist or semi-Socialist or Radical Ministry in the interests of an anti-democratic reaction. Even if the Guards, or some other part of the active army of young conscripts, were to be misled or coerced or bribed into supporting a reactionary coup d'état, there would still be behind the democratic movement the mass of the trained reservists in civil life, who might be called up on the popular side, if a nucleus of organization were left intact to conduct a civil war. On the whole, universal military service seems to a limited extent a safeguard for democracy, or at least for its outer forms. That, of course, has always been the opinion of Continental Socialists, who have always wished to retain compulsory service, though with a very brief period of training and with many reforms in the system of discipline and command such as Jaures has sketched in L'Armée Nouvelle.
In the Germany of to-day one may study, though in somewhat bewildering complexity, conditions which strip society to the foundation, and reveal at its base this factor of physical force, which we in England habitually ignore in our thinking, because it is more comfortable to ignore it. The structure of power is so unstable in its poise that one hardly knows which of many shocks to its balance is the most likely to upset it. Perhaps a fatalist would be right who reckoned that so many forces tugging in various directions may, after all, and in the end neutralize each other. In the first place one has to consider the professional interests of this mercenary army. It is composed of young men to whom high pay and plenty of good food were an attraction; they must have belonged to the minority which in all countries really enjoys continual fighting, is not revolted by brutality, and has no sentimental objection whatever to shooting working men. A high proportion of them are ex-officers, or students, and the rest seemed to be young boys, mostly from the country. What will happen, when this force of about 450,000 is reduced, in accordance with the Treaty, first to 200,000 and then (by next March) to 100,000 men? Will they allow themselves to be disbanded, or will they be content to exact subsidies and similar compensations? Again their discipline will be tested severely when the Allies present for surrender their list of commanders by land and sea, some of them probably popular and successful leaders to whom every mess-table looks up. Will the Free Corps assist in arresting and guarding these accused commanders and in handing them over to be tried by enemy courts-martial? Will they even sit quiet while this unpopular operation is carried out by the civil police T To any one who has watched the failure of the authorities to punish those convicted of atrocities in suppressing Spartacus that will seem questionable. Again, if the Government, partly from necessity and partly from electioneering motives, proceeds to measures which the propertied class will regard as "the end of all things"—a drastic levy on capital, the nationalization of certain industries and the subdivision of the Junker estates—will the officers of the Corps remain passive if the Conservative leaders should think that the time is ripe to attempt a reactionary coup in defense of property? These Corps cannot have the mentality of a conscript army. The officers may number one in twenty-five of the whole force (that is a provision of the Treaty), and the ranks are largely composed of middle-class men. The tension of interests is so terrific in Germany to-day, and the difficulty of paying both debts and indemnities will be so great, that no Government can avoid onslaughts on property which will be leveling in their effect. They will be doubly unpopular because they are imposed by foreign Powers, and will benefit foreign Powers. The temptation to resist will be strong, and if the propertied class should appeal successfully to the Pretorian Guard, there is no internal force which could resist it in open warfare. At the best it might perhaps be wearied out in a long guerrilla struggle, for its numbers on the 100,000 basis (if the Allies really insist upon that) are not adequate to maintain order over a territory so large as Germany.
If it came to a struggle, however, we are thrown on the other horn of the dilemma of force. There is, thanks to the Treaty, no regular reserve of force, no militia or civic guard, to which a democratic Government could appeal if the professional army rose against it. The opposition would come in the form of mass risings, guerrilla attacks, and above all strikes, from the revolutionary forces. The struggle would necessarily end in the victory of one of the extremes. Long before it were decided, however, the Entente would presumably intervene, either by a forward march from the Rhine or by the re-imposition of the blockade. No pedantry of any dilatory legal procedure laid down in the League of Nations Covenant would be likely to stand in the way. The Council of the League can drive a "coach and four" through that Covenant any day, by the simple expedient of refusing to "recognize" the German Government, whether reactionary or revolutionary, against which it proposed to intervene. Thus we are confronted with another aspect of the haunting problem of force. Any revolutionary movement in Germany or Austria which comes to power, even if it is in a sense a defensive movement acting against a lawless militarism, will have to satisfy the workers by creating a Soviet form of government. I happen to know, on first-hand authority, that an official warning was given this spring by the British to the Austrian Government, that while socialistic legislation would be tolerated, the adoption of a Soviet Constitution would be the signal for instant intervention.
It seems to me that in this attempt to impose a middle course on the German States, while at the same time forbidding them to build security upon a citizen militia, we expose them defenseless to the two extremes. There is force available for a reactionary policy, the force of the long-term professional army, with its reactionary officer caste. There is also force, at least potential force, available in the form of the turbulent revolutionary strike, which may be used to render the control of the Pretorian Guard over the seat and organs of government precarious and useless. One hundred thousand mercenaries may terrorize Berlin and some of the federal capitals, but they can hardly at the same time control the entire railway system, the mines, and the scattered industrial regions. The difficulty might have been evaded if in the first days of the Revolution the Ebert-Scheidemann Government had done what Doctors Jenner and Bauer so cleverly did in Vienna. The Austrians made a militia from reliable Socialist material, and it has stood by them loyally through all the trials of the blockade. Whether it can be converted into a long-service professional army in accordance with the Treaty is, however, very doubtful. The German Government was confronted with an appallingly difficult problem. It had to combat a violent Spartacist movement, subsidized with Russian money, fairly-well supplied with arms, and able to command the services of some trained bodies of revolutionary troops, especially the men from the fleet. Only a very skilful Government could have dealt with this reckless armed revolt without creating a counterrevolutionary force, which is certain sooner or later to embarrass it, if not overthrow it. It is easy to blame Scheidemann and Noske for calling in the new militarism of the mercenary fighting caste, but it was Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (for all the honor that we pay their martyred memory) who first appealed to force, and sharpened the class war into an armed conflict.
Every social doctrine has its own appropriate solution of the problem of force. It is natural for capitalism to create a professional army. It is natural for Communism to rely on the proletarian Red Guard. What we in England do not sufficiently realize is that any process of evolutionary Socialism, which means to retain the typical democratic Parliamentary forms, will be insecure in its advance unless it has in reserve a militia which includes the whole body of citizens, or to be more precise, the men. We are apt to say that we need no force: we shall advance only as we have the opinion of the majority with us. But what shall we do if our opponents appeal to force? Sooner or later there will come a moment when a propertied minority, if its privileges are sufficiently threatened, will appeal to force against us and will not scruple itself to defy Parliamentary forms. What then shall we do if it has behind it a docile professional force armed with all the modern engines of aircraft, tanks, and gas? How much would constitutional right avail us, massed though we might be in our majorities, against a squadron of aeroplanes manned by officers and flying low, with their machine guns and their bombs?
In nothing has the League of Nations as it exists to-day shown itself so consciously a capitalist creation as in its decision to make the long-term mercenary army the custodian of the force that survives in the world. We are no nearer to the end of militarism. What has happened is that the older militarism, which was on the whole nationalist in its scope and aim, is being transformed into a new institution which rests definitely upon class. We are returning to the age of "chivalry" when arms were the monopoly of the caste.