I had said farewell to service on the active list with a feeling of loyal gratitude to my Emperor and King, with the warmest wishes for his army, and in full confidence in the future of our Fatherland. But at heart I always remained the soldier.
Thanks to the wealth of experience I had gained in every department of my profession, I could look back gratefully and feel satisfied with what I had done in the past. There was nothing that could cloud the vision over which lay the magic of youthful dreams come true. My voluntary retirement was therefore not without a certain feeling of homesickness for the life I had left behind me, nor without many a longing to be back in the army. In the peace of my new life my hope that my emperor would again summon me if danger threatened the Fatherland, my wish to devote the last ounce of my strength to his service, lost nothing of their force.
At the time I left the army an extraordinarily strong intellectual wave was sweeping over it. The invigorating contest between the old and the new, between ruthless progress and careful conservatism, was reconciled to a happy medium in the practical experiences of the recent war. In spite of the new path which those experiences opened to us, they leave no doubt that with all the increased importance to be attached to material in war, the value of the training and moral education of the soldier is as high as ever. Stout-hearted action has maintained its precedence over all the refinements of intellect. Presence of mind and strength of character take a higher place in war than fertility of ideas. Weapons of destruction have been brought to perfection, but war has none the less preserved its simple, I might almost say coarse, forms. It tolerated no weaknesses of human nature, and permitted no fastidiousness in military training. What it demanded as the primary necessity was that a man should be turned into a resolute personality.
In peacetime a good many people believed that the army could be reproached with unproductivity. That reproach was perfectly justified if by unproductivity the creation of material values was meant. But it was certainly false if productivity was regarded from the higher, moral point of view.
Everyone who does not, either from prejudice or mere spite, condemn our military work in peacetime offhand, must admit that the army is the finest school for will and action. How many thousands of men have first learned under its influence of what physical and moral feats they were capable, and acquired that self-confidence and inward strength that have never left them through life? Where have the idea of equality and the sense of unity among our people found more striking expression than in the all-leveling school of our great national army? In the army the human inclination to unlimited egotism, with its tendency to disintegrate society and the state, is blessedly purified and transformed by the rigid self-discipline of the individual for the good of the whole. The army trained and strengthened that mighty organizing impulse which we found everywhere in our Fatherland, in the domain of politics as in that of science, in trade as in technical studies, in industry as in the labor world, in agriculture as in the professions. The conviction that the subordination of the individual to the good of the community was not only a necessity but a positive blessing had gripped the mind of the German Army, and through it that of the German nation. It was only thus that the colossal feats were possible which were needed, and which we performed under the stress of dire necessity and against a world of enemies.
On the battlefields of Europe, Asia, and Africa the German officer and the German soldier have given proof that our training was on right lines. Even if the long duration of the last war with its multiplicity of impressions had a demoralizing effect on some natures, even if the moral principles of others were confused by the unnerving action of mental and physical overstrain, and characters, hitherto blameless, succumbed to the many temptations, the true core of the army remained sound and worthy of its task in spite of the unprecedented strain.
The reproach has often been cast at the old army that it endeavored to degrade a free man into an automaton. But the battlefields of the Great War have shown what a strengthening influence our training has had even in the midst of the disintegrating influences of incessant fighting. Innumerable glorious and yet terrible events have shown to what heights of voluntary heroism the German soldier can rise, not because he says, "I must," but because he says, "I can."
It is inherent in the course of events that with the dissolution of the old army new paths for the training of the nation and its defensive forces should be demanded.
As regards that demand I stand by the old tried principles. Even if there are some who do not consider there is anything final about the means by which we are to recover the power to repeat our former achievements, they will certainly agree with me at least in this, that it is vital for the future of our Fatherland that we should recover that power. If not, it means that we should renounce our position in the world, and let ourselves be degraded to the role of the anvil because we have neither the courage nor the resolution to be the hammer when the hour comes.
The question how we are to recover the great school of organization and energy which we possessed in our old army is possibly a fateful one, not only for the future political prosperity of our German Homeland, but even for its economic welfare. Germany can recover and succeed as easily as any other country on earth, and maintain a tolerable place in the world, but only by putting forth and concentrating all her creative energies. Unfortunately there is a marked reaction against the existing strong order, thanks to the disintegrating influences of an unsuccessful war and the fallacious idea that the subordination of all the national forces to one controlling will could not have prevented the disaster to the Fatherland. Resentment against the ancient voluntary or compulsory subjection burst the old barriers, and wandered aimlessly in new paths. Can we hope for success along these lines? Hitherto we have lost far more in moral and ethical values from the effects of political dissolution than from the war itself. If we do not soon create new educative forces, if we continue to exhaust the spiritual and moral soil of our nation as we have done hitherto, we shall soon convert the foundations of our political existence to a barren waste!