erm of a "nation in arms," and
whose membership is recruited from every stratum of society, there
should be such wholesale maltreatment of the privates by their
superior officers. And yet such is the fact, inexplicable as it seems
at first sight. Against this curse the Kaiser has likewise launched
his thunderbolts at some time or other. But they have had no effect.
If anything there has been an increase in such cases.

At a Reichstag session, in the middle of December, the Kaiser's
spokesman, General von Einem, made the formal admission that during
the preceding year no fewer than fifty officers and five hundred and
seventy-nine non-commissioned officers had been court-martialed and
sentenced for cruelly maltreating their subordinates. When we reflect
that scarcely in one case out of every hundred formal charges are
preferred by the victims, who know themselves completely in the power
of their tyrannous masters, the official record thus stated is indeed
appalling. But here again the Kaiser himself, as chief commander of
the army, must be held largely responsible; for his more than lenient
treatment of the convicted offenders is nothing less than a direct
encouragement to their fellows to continue in these fiendish
practices. One sergeant, a man by the name of Franzki, belonging to
the Eighty-fifth Regiment of the Infantry, was shown at the trial to
have been guilty of no less than twelve hundred and fifty individual
cases of cruelty and of one hundred cases of abuse of power. Another
man, Lieutenant Schilling, of the Ninety-eighth Regiment of Infantry,
stationed in Metz, had a record against him of over a thousand such
cases. Both men were recently tried and convicted, and the degree of
their punishment seems strangely inadequate. Yet in most instances the
Kaiser does not even allow these convicted offenders to serve out
their brief terms of confinement, but issues free pardons to them
after they have undergone but a small portion of their penalty.

However, from several points of view, the most serious evil of all
that has grown up within the German army since the close of the
Franco-German War of 1870-1871 is the cleavage in sentiment between
the army and the nation. That also has been demonstrable on many
occasions during recent years. I recall the case of Lieutenant von
Bruesewitz, of Carlsruhe. This young officer ran his sword through the
back of a defenceless civilian by whom he fancied himself insulted in
a res