use at
least fifty out of every hundred of him are professed Socialists with a
definite and bitter political programme against certain manifestations
of the autocracy. (It is calculated that two-fifths of the entire army
is Socialist.) He may not argue very closely while in the act of war;
indeed, he could not. But enormous experience is accumulated in his
subconsciousness--experience of bullying and cowardice, of humiliation,
of injustice, of lying, and of his own most secret shortcomings--for he,
too, is somewhat of the bully, out for self-aggrandisement as well as
for self-defense, and his conscience privately tells him so. The
organization is still colossal, magnificent, terrific. In the general
fever of activity he persuades himself that nothing can withstand the
organization; but at the height of some hand-to-hand crisis, when
one-hundredth of a dogged grain of obstinacy will turn the scale, he may
remember an insult from an incompetent officer, or the protectionism at
home which puts meat beyond his purse in order to enrich the landowner,
or even the quite penal legislation of the autocracy against the
co-operative societies of the poor, and the memory (in spite of him) may
decide a battle. Men think of odd matters in a battle, and it is a
scientific certainty that, at the supreme pinch, the subconscious must
react.

*Felix Adler's Comment*

*From The Standard, Oct. 14, 1914.*

Apropos of a recent article by Mr. Arnold Bennett, wherein he speaks of
the resentment which the German soldiers--two-fifths of them
Socialists--must feel against the bullying discipline to which they have
been subjected, the following reflections are jotted down. The reader
who is interested in pursuing the subject further may profitably consult
a book entitled "Imperial Germany," by Prince von Buelow, which contains
some penetrating observations on the workings of the German mind, as
well as the chapter on Germany in Alfred Fouillee's notable work,
"Esquisse Psychologique des Peuples Europeens."

The precision which characterizes the operations of the German military
machine is due to the German notion of discipline. Discipline in Germany
is based on the peculiar place assigned to the expert. Military experts
exercise in their branch an authority different in degree but not in
kind from that belonging to experts in other departments--strategy,
tactics, improvements of armament, methods of mobilization. The inexpert
soldier s