The feeling of amazement with which the world is looking on at the
Prussian campaigns comes not so much from the tremendous display of
physical force they afford--though there is in this something almost
appalling--as from the consciousness which everybody begins to have
that to put such an engine of destruction as the German army into
operation there must be behind it a new kind of motive power. It is
easy enough for any government to put its whole male population
under arms, or even to lead them on an emergency to the field. But
that an army composed in the main of men suddenly taken from civil
pursuits should fight and march, as the Prussian army is doing, with
more than the efficiency of any veteran troops the world has yet
seen, and that the administrative machinery by which they are fed,
armed, transported, doctored, shrived, and buried should go like
clock-work on the enemy's soil, and that the people should submit
not only without a murmur, but with enthusiasm, to sacrifices such
as have never before been exacted of any nation except in the very
throes of despair, show that something far more serious has taken
place in Prussia than the transformation of the country into a camp.
In other words, we are not witnessing simply a levy _en masse_, nor
yet the mere maintenance of an immense force by a military monarchy,
but the application to military affairs of the whole intelligence of
a nation of great mental and moral culture. The peculiarity of the
Prussian system does not lie in the size of its armies or the
perfection of its armament, but in the character of the men who
compose it. All modern armies, except Cromwell's "New Model Army"
and that of the United States during the rebellion, have been
composed almost entirely of ignorant peasants drilled into passive
obedience to a small body of professional soldiers. The Prussian