The Second World War Read Online Free

and gold – available in quantities more copious than any of which the richest king had ever disposed – promised victories swifter and more total even than those which had been achieved by Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.
    Such victories were promised but could not necessarily be delivered; for the greatest material riches do not avail if the human qualities necessary to animate them are lacking. But here too the nineteenth century had wrought a sea-change. The eighteenth-century soldier had been a poor creature, the liveried servant of his king, sometimes – in Russia and Prussia – an actual serf delivered into the state’s service by his feudal master. Uniform was, indeed, a livery, which reigning monarchs conspicuously did not wear. Those who did bore it as a mark of surrendered rights. It meant that they had succumbed to ‘want or hardship’, the most common impulse to enlistment; that they had changed sides (turncoat prisoners of war formed large contingents in most armies); that they had accepted mercenary service under foreign colours (as tens of thousands of Swiss, Scots, Irish, Slavs and other highlanders and backwoodsmen did throughout the
ancien régime
); that they had ‘plea-bargained’ out of imprisonment for petty crime or attachment for civic debt; or simply that they had failed to run fast enough from the press-gang. The volunteer was almost the rarest if the best of soldiers. Because so many of his comrades-in-arms were unwilling warriors, the penalties for desertion were draconian and the code of discipline ferocious. The eighteenth-century soldier was flogged for infractions of duty and hanged for indiscipline, both sorts of offence being loosely interpreted.
    The nineteenth-century soldier, by contrast, was a man who wanted to be what he was. A willing, often an enthusiastic, soldier, he was usually a conscript but one who accepted his term of (admittedly short) service as a just subtraction from his years of liberty, to be performed with cheerfulness as well as obedience. This was the case at least from mid-century onwards and in the armies of the most advanced states – Prussia first and foremost, but also France and Austria, with the smaller and more backward hurrying to follow suit. Such a change of attitude is difficult to document but real enough nevertheless. Perhaps its most tangible manifestation was the appearance of the regimental souvenir which began to be manufactured in tens of thousands towards the end of the nineteenth century. The souvenir, typically in Germany a china drinking mug, decorated with pictures of regimental life, usually bore the names of the conscript’s fellow platoon members, some couplets of doggerel verse, a salutation to the regiment – ‘Here’s to the 12th Grenadiers’ – and the universal superscription ‘In memory of my service time’. The young soldier who had been sent off garlanded with flowers by his neighbours – a strikingly different farewell from that given to the Russian serf conscript of the eighteenth century, for whom the village priest said a requiem mass – bore back his souvenir when his service time was over to stand in a place of honour in the family home.
    This remarkable change of attitude was literally revolutionary. The roots of the change were manifold, but the three most important led directly to the French Revolution and the principal slogans of its ideology: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
    Military service became popular in the nineteenth century first because it was an experience of
equality
. ‘Cook’s son – Duke’s son – son of a belted Earl,’ Rudyard Kipling wrote of the army Britain sent to fight the Boers in 1900, with some accuracy. Popular enthusiasm for the war did sweep all classes into the ranks as common soldiers; but they were, of course, volunteers. Universal conscription in the European armies took all classes willy-nilly – in Prussia from 1814, in Austria from 1867, in France from 1889 –