ROTTING THE APPLES
Would you like to have your own private army - without spending a cent? Impossible? Not at all. It happens all the time.
The cheapening of the soldiery is one of the blessings of modernity. Among other innovations, the post-1789 period in Europe created the citizen army. The number of soldiers exploded: in 1740, the peacetime Prussian army numbered 80,000 men, that of France, 160,000. In 1914, the peacetime strength of the German army was 750,000 which swelled to 1,700,000 on a war footing. Excess reserves and the Landswehr brought the total that could be brought into the field to 5,300,000; the peacetime strength of the French army was 800,000, its wartime strength 1,600,000, which, with reserves, totalled 4,400,000 men And these men were all nationals, unlike previous soldiers, many of whom had been foreigners (S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p 1549).
How did this remarkable change come about?
Finer continues: "In the old days, no state could have supported the cost of paying so many troops. But now they did not have to pay them more than a mere pittance. Here was a complete contrast to the eighteenth century: after all, it was the cost of the American War that led to the financial crisis in France and thereby the Revolution. This was all turned on its head, and the reason for it was that by now the ideology of nationalism had gripped the masses. It no longer seemed exceptional to be a soldier. Every able-bodied man regarded this, now, as a sacred duty. That is how, when 1914 came, so many millions of men went to their graves like sheep" (pp 1552-1553) (italics original).
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