Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ...food, were serious matters. This impaired success and showed poor discipline. But it was equally serious that our young company commanders, as well as senior officers, did not feel strong enough to take disciplinary action and to seize sufficient authority to enable them to lead their men forward without delay. The absence of our old peace-trained corps of officers was most severely felt. They had been the repository of the moral strength of the army. In addition, during the first half of the war the Reichstag had made the penal laws more lenient. The commanders responsible for maintaining discipline were deprived of their most effective punishment, in that a sentence of "severe arrest" no longer involved being tied up to a fixed object. No doubt this punishment was extraordinarily severe, and its execution should not be left to the juvenile and inexperienced company commanders, but to abolish it altogether was fatal. The alleviation may have been justifiable at the time, but now it proved disastrous. The frequent declarations of amnesty also had a bad influence on the men. The Entente no doubt achieved more than we did with its considerably more severe punishments. This historic truth is well established. Other evils in connection with the administration of justice were also due to the long war. The judges had come to regard military offenses with a leniency which was often incomprehensible. A contributory cause of this was that the cases which had occurred at the front were not dealt with immediately by the unit, but farther in the rear in quite different circumstances and after a certain time had elapsed. It should always have been remembered that there were many men in the army who deserved no mercy whatever; of this the numerous...