422 DISARMAMENT OF GERMANY AND AFTER March 9, I had been the witness of a dramatic spectacle, a spectacle invested by circumstances with a kind of tragic splendour. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles all the military schools in Germany, including the cadet schools, had to be closed down within two months of ratification, and it was part of my duty as the officer then in charge of Schools and Recruiting' to see that this was done. A few miles outside Berlin, in the suburb of Gross Lichterfelde, there is a great cadet school, the Hauptkadettenanstalt, or 'H. K. A.,' endeared to generations of German officers by the playful epithets of Hat Keine Aussicht,' and 'Homœopathische Kur Anstalt.'* It was the cradle of the German Officers' Corps, and its battle-honours are written large in the terrible casualty lists of the German Army. Here were nurtured von Moltke and all the paladins of the Great General Staff whose portraits adorn the walls of its great hall of ceremony with their mural bas-reliefs portraying the career of a cadet from the day of his novitiate, his entrance, his drill, his musketry training, and his graduation. What Sandhurst and Woolwich are to the British Army, Gross Lichterfelde was to the German Army of yesterday—and may be to the Army of tomorrow. This, and more than this, for Gross Lichterfelde was, in a country in which 'public schools' in the English sense do not exist, the one great public school; the officer's son-and an officer's son he almost invariably was— entered it as a child of ten years or more, was drafted into a company, instead of a 'house,' rose to be a 'N.C.O.' instead of a prefect, and after passing his ensign's examination proceeded by one route or another-by posting to a regiment, by passing into a 'Selekta' class, or by entering a 'War School'-to a commission, entering the German Officers' Corps on the day he was gazetted with two years' seniority over all other aspirants to that great caste. Such was Gross Lichterfelde, such its pride of place, and, by an inexorable decree, its days were numbered. In accordance with our orders, transmitted through the Reichswehrministerium, it closed its doors on March 9, but not without a most moving ceremony, such a ceremony as even now, after Which, freely translated, might be rendered, 'All hope abandon ye who enter here,' or, in the alternative, 'Homœopathic Cure Institution.' fo T pa 0 a four years, I cannot recall without a certain poignancy. he young cadets, the flower of German boyhood, were d araded in uniform in a hollow square, and the colours vere brought forth for the last time. Generations of Officers of the old army, some decrepit with years, others lisabled by wounds, some in mufti, others in uniform vho in happier days had passed through the school, were assembled as at a requiem and marched past the commandant, Ludendorff at the head of them, saluting he colours as they passed. It had seemed to me altogether more decent to keep away from a spectacle 30 tragic; and of what happened at Gross Lichterfelde I only learnt afterwards from two British officers whom I had sent there in mufti to mix unobtrusively with the crowd. But I was not to escape the poignancy of that last scene; at the Brandenburger Thor I heard the martial music of 'Fredericus Rex,' and a long column of cadets in their blue tunics with red facings and goldmounted Pickel-hauben came into view, marching with the parade-step and a precision of dressing' so perfect that they might have been a regiment of the Guards, their young faces bearing witness to a strongly repressed emotion too deep for tears, as they kept their eyes fixed on the colours ahead of them on which they were to look for the last time. At a corner of the street a German general on horseback, whose name I never knew, took their salute, and it seemed to me, as their eyes turned towards him, as though a single cry had gone up from a thousand young hearts-Morituri te Salutamus. But on opening my German newspaper the next morning I read the allocutions of Ludendorff and Hoffmann at Gross Lichterfelde, and learnt with considerable surprise that they had more than hinted to the cadets that the suppression of their alma mater would prove to be only temporary. And six weeks later the Commission received the stupendous Note on the future of the armament factories, close on the heels of an Army Order, the transmission of which purported to acquaint us with the German scheme for the constitution of a 'transitional Army, twice the Treaty strength, for which, by an independent Note addressed directly to Paris, they hoped to obtain the sanction of the Allies as a permanent n three Army Corps districts alone-hardy soldiers of ortune who had joined the standard of some popular general, or officer of field rank, whose name they bore on their colours like some 20th-century condottiere, Lutzow,'Ehrhardt,' 'Aulock,' 'Paulsen,' and many another, and who were ready to go anywhere and do anything except go home and be demobilised. The temper of their leaders was well illustrated by the answer given by the notorious Ehrhardt to one of our officers, who asked him, after the Kapp 'Putsch,' why his men had marched on the inoffensive city of Berlin, where I had seen them shoot down harmless citizens in cold blood. 'Why?' exclaimed the astonished condottiere. 'Because I told them to. Wasn't that enough? ' Their strength was at least another 50,000. There was also that strange simulacrum of the regular Army, the Security Police,' to-day a greater problem than ever, then 60,000 strong, and now probably at least twice that strength, who in Berlin were only the old Guards regiments under another name. There were the 'Volunbeers' (the Zeitfreiwillige). There were what, for want of a better name in English, may be called the Special Constabulary (the Einwohnerwehren), who counted for at least another 600,000 men, and whose strength one German newspaper put at two millions. Discounting them altogether as only another form of a levée en masse, and not necessarily men fit for general service, there were well over 500,000 picked troops immediately available for any emergency. And this was eighteen months after Germany had capitulated in the field. But the real problem-and a problem, to a large extent, it remains-lay far deeper. It was Mobilisation. A force of 500,000 effectives was not negligible, but the more important question was whether this force was meant to be the nucleus of expansion into a war strength of many millions-in other words, whether there was the #will, the power, the machinery so to expand it. It is a matter deserving of rather close attention, for it is not done with yet. At this time it was my duty to report direct to the War Office on the Armed Forces of Germany, and the task involved a very close study of the organisation of the old Army. The responsibility was not a light one, but before entering on my duties I had de de th t PC m 0. 426 DISARMAMENT OF GERMANY AND AFTER had the advantage for twelve months of sitting at the feet of two distinguished soldiers whose knowledge of the German Army organisation was unrivalled-General Macdonogh, the A.G. and perhaps the most brilliant D.M.I. our Army has ever had, who had appointed me his personal representative in Paris for the Peace Conference, and General Barthélemy, for many years head of the famous Deuxième Bureau,' destined to be it President of our Effectives Sub-Commission, who for some months in 1919, before the Commission was assembled in Berlin, had 'coached' me thoroughly in the whole subject, and who later, after a few months of probation, appointed me his deputy at the head of 'Effectives.' With such tutors it was my own fault if I had not mastered my task. Very soon after our arrival I had been struck by the fact that the German authorities, in reply to a Questionnaire Questionnaire' of ours, announced their intention of retaining the whole of their Demobilisation' organisation together with its personnel for another two years-in other words, for a period extending far beyond that for which the Commission was expected to remain and exercise control. It seemed a surprising claim and a rather expensive one for a country supposed to be impoverished, whose first object, one would have thought, would have been retrenchment in administration; it amounted, moreover, to a claim that the demobilisation of the old Army would take three and a half years from the date (November 1918) on which it had returned to its depôts. And the personnel of this organisation was remarkable: 3579 officers or 'ex-officers'-as will be seen later they meant the same thing, 16,392 N.C.O.'s or 'ex-N.C.O.'s' and only 8517 men-a curiously hydrocephalous organisation. None of these were borne on the estimates of the transitional Army at all, or included in its strength returns, but were claimed to be 'demilitarised' or, in the alternative, 'detached' (abkommandiert). I will not anticipate all that we discovered later about 'demilitarisation'; suffice it to say here that the policy had already begun of transferring whole services of Army administration to 'civil' departments in order to take them off the Army estimates and escape our control. I first found the clue to this policy in an Army Order of January 1920, |