74
MILITARISM
later occasion. It forms, it is true, not a legal, but in practice perhaps the most effective, of all violent disciplinary methods of militarism.
Thus they attempt to tame men as they tame animals. Thus the recruits are drugged, confused, flattered, bribed, oppressed, imprisoned, polished and beaten; thus one grain is added to the other and mixed and kneaded to furnish the mortar for the immense edifice of the army; thus one stone is laid upon the other in a well calculated fashion to form a bulwark against the forces of subversion.[1]
- ↑ The military results of these educational methods are dealt with elsewhere. We must also point out their moral results, which induce the bourgeois, the anarchist and semi-anarchist opponents of militarism to let themselves be carried away by an indignation breathing an uncommon passion and delivered with a verbose pathos. "The army is the school of crime" (Anatole France); "drunkenness, sexual immorality and hypocrisy, that is what life in the barracks teaches" (Prof. Richet). According to the "Manuel du soldat" the time of military service is an "apprenticeship in brutality and vulgarity"; "a school of debauchery"; it leads to "moral cowardice, submission and slavish fearfulness." Indeed, one can scarcely imagine certain military festivals without the patriotic drunkenness, which is of course "upholding the state." Consult the Leipziger Volkszeitung, of December 1, 1906, about "the drinking and rioting festivals" of the veterans' associations (words used by Pastor César). The sanitary results are likewise anything but gratifying. Concerning the French army, see p. 64, note 3; the sanitary state of the
