The Second World War Read Online Free Page B

pump,
     
found themselves in a simpler society than the one they knew in civil life. The private soldier lost almost all personal responsibility. Ritual and routine took care of nearly every working hour. Simple obedience to the orders that punctuated that routine from time to time, and set activity off in some new direction, offered release from the anxieties inherent in personal decision-making – anxieties that multiplied incontinently in urban society, where rival leaders, rival loyalties and practical alternatives as to how to spend at least part of one’s time competed insistently for attention. Paradoxical as it may sound, escape from freedom was often a real liberation, especially for young men living under very rapidly changing conditions, who had not yet been able to assume fully adult roles.
     
    Even when allowance is made for the force of this percipient observation, however, the ultimate importance of universal conscription in changing attitudes to military service was that it ultimately connected with
liberty
, in its political if not its personal sense. The old armies had been instruments of oppression of the people by kings; the new armies were to be instruments of the people’s liberation from kings, even if that liberation was to be narrowly institutional in the states which retained monarchy. The two ideas were not mutually contradictory. The French National Convention had decreed in 1791 that ‘the battalion organised in each district shall be united under a banner bearing the inscription: “The French people united against tyranny”.’ That decree encapsulated the idea inherent in the United States Constitution that ‘the right to bear arms’, once made common, was a guarantee of direct freedoms. Two years earlier the revolutionary leader, Dubois-Crance, had articulated the congruent proposition: ‘Each citizen should be a soldier, and each soldier a citizen, or we shall never have a constitution.’
    The tension between the principles of winning freedoms by revolutionary assault and extracting them in legal form by performance of military duty was to transfix European political life for much of the nineteenth century. The excess of freedom won by force of arms in France provoked the reaction of Thermidor and diverted the fervour of the extremist
sans-culottes
into conquest abroad. The victories of the ‘revolutionary’ armies (after 1795 firmly under the control of their officers, many of them, ironically, returned monarchists) then had the effect of provoking their enemies, particularly the Prussian and Austrian kings, into decreeing a variation of the
levée-en-masse
or general conscription, the original manifestation of the French Revolution in its military form. Such conscription produced popular forces –
Landwehr, Landsturm, Freischützen
– to oppose the French on their home territories.
    Landwehr
and
Freischützen
became an embarrassment as soon as their work was done. With Napoleon safely on St Helena, Prussia and Austria consigned these popular forces, with their liberal-minded bourgeois officers, to the status of reserve contingents, and intended never to call on their services again. Nevertheless they survived until 1848, ‘year of revolutions’, when their members actively participated in the street battles for constitutional rights in Vienna and Berlin – where the uprising was put down by the Prussian Guard, the ultimate bastion of traditional authority. They had meanwhile been replicated in France, whose National Guard would keep alive the ‘liberal’ principle in military life under the Second Empire and, after the withdrawal of the Prussians from Paris in 1871, rise against the regular army of the conservative Third Republic in a bloody Commune which would cost the lives of 20,000 of its members.
     
‘No conscription without representation’
    The struggle of these citizen forces with the armies of reaction, though ending in physical defeat, nevertheless indirectly