November 21, 1011 
LAND AND WATER 
careful student of the war to scet the broad facts 
in mind. We are dealing with the year 1914:. The 
census gives us no accurate figures, I believe, since 
four years ago. At any rate, upon the figures 
of four years ago the following estimates are based. 
The total number of males in the German 
Empire is, or rather then was, just over 32 millions. 
Of this number just under 19 millions (now just 
over 19 millions) lay between the ages of 17 and 70, 
■which are not only the technical legal limits of 
conceivable legal compulsion, but in all conscience 
the extreme conceivable limits between which the 
stupider sex can be put to any military service 
whatsoever. 
As in every other conscript nation, there are 
in Germany among the men trained to arms two 
clear categories. 
(1) Those who are thought to be of an age fully 
fit for the exercise and strain of a campaign. The 
age is not the same in every country, but it may 
briefly be expressed by the words, " the middle 
or early thirties." 
One may put it thus : A conscript nation not 
compelled to put forth its very last strength, but 
so seriously engaged as to need all its reasonably 
efficient effectives, would call out the men actually 
with the colours — that is, the men from about 21 
years of age to about 23 or 24, and another 10, or 
at the most 12, or at the least 8 " classes," that is 
yearly contingents that had done their active train- 
ing in the past and had gone back to their civilian 
occupations. Now this body, by whatever name 
■we call it (and let us call it " Tne active regular 
army on a war footing ") is, in the modern German 
Empire, well over two million men. 
(2) Every conscript army also has the services 
available of older men not of an age under 
normal circumstances to undertake, without 
danger to the efficiency of the whole, the 
strain of a campaign, and these men may be 
called up from the early or middle thirties to, - 
let us say, 45 or 48 years of age, accord- 
ing to the system in use. Forty-eight is an extreme 
limit, and after what may be called the early 
forties, the average man's value in the field is very 
rapidly lowering. Remember that we are not 
speaking of soldiers permanently under training, 
but of the reserves of a conscript army who have 
become for all intents and purposes civilians. This 
second body of men, as a whole inferior in military 
value to the first, in their older categories conspicu- 
ously inferior, are known in the German system 
as the " Landwehr," and they correspond roughly 
to what the French call " Territorials." 
It must not be imagined that a unit merely 
because it is a Landwehr unit is inefficient. Many 
such units can be formed and are formed, espew- 
ally from the younger categories, of the most ex- 
cellent material. They are men in what we call 
" the prime of life," at any rate for ordinary 
civilian work, and, through the selection which 
Germany exercises in her choice of men (for she 
trains less than half her men as soldiers), these 
men are commonly of the healthy agricultural 
type, which means so much to an army. At any 
rate, counting good material with bad, the Land- 
wehr formations come to about another two mil- 
lions, and bring up the total of the trained army 
that can at a pinch take the field to more than 
four million three hundred thousand, and less than 
^l million men. 
It i§ after these numbers have been exhausted 
and when there is a call for immediate further 
reserves that the peculiar features of the German 
system come in. For under one common name of 
" Landsturm " are included the masses of younger 
men (half the nation who have not been chosen for 
military service at all), and the much smaller cate- 
gory of elderly men who have indeed in their time 
been soldiers, but who are now declining in life 
and have passed middle age. 
It is well for the purposes of our analysis to 
treat these two categories of the Landsturm quite 
separately, for to try to use the mass of men in the 
field at all after 48 to 50 is ridiculous. There are 
plenty of exceptions, of course, and in a perma- 
nently trained army those exceptions would be ex- 
ceedingly numerous, but of a thousand civilians 
past 50 whom you can suddenly call for service 
in the field the proportion is so small as to be almost 
negligible. They would simply weaken any force 
in which they were incorporated. 
Well, the number of trained men between the 
Landviehr limit and 50 is obviously small and 
hardly worth counting in connection with such vast 
figures as these. A great number of them will 
have dropped out of all possible use from physical 
causes. If to the four million and a half, say, of 
the true army you could get half a million out of 
the trained Landsturm, it is certainly all you could 
get, and it is very doubtful if you could get that. 
In other words, the men who have been trained 
and who are too old for the Landwehr do not 
appreciably add to Germany's military strength. 
Her real reserve in men is that untrained body- 
corresponding in years to the trained body, and 
standing side by side with it, stretching from the 
21st year to about the 45th. And as the regular 
army organised gives you about four million and a 
half, you may count this potential reserve of 
human untrained material at about somewhat over 
five but less than six million. For, taking one set 
of years with another, Germany has on an average 
taken rather less than half her adult males and 
trained them for longer or shorter periods. 
The total of all males whatsoever, including 
cripples and lunatics and blind and paralytic be- 
tween 21 and 45, is in round numbers 10 millions. 
Let us take the largest figure and put the whole 
untrained mass of males of fighting ages as high 
as somewhat over 5 millions. That is at first 
sight a reserve that can at least almost double the 
regular army and Landwehr. 
But wait a moment. This untrained half in- 
cludes all those who are physically unable to serve. 
It is far too low an estimate to put these at two 
millions. To count only two millions out of 11 
millions as physically unable to serve would mean 
an exemption for physical causes of less than 20 
per cent. In France, where every single male is 
taken that can serve at all, the proportion of 
physical exempts is higher than that, even 
among the quite young men, and Germany, 
with her urban industrial population, has 
certainly a higher percentage of incapables than 
France with her peasant population, and it is 
obvious that as age increases, the proportion of 
men unfit to serve increases very rapidly — allow at 
the very least 2^ millions. The untrained Land- 
sturm, then, may fairly be set at no more than 
three million and a half, and everyone who desires 
to form a just estimate of the number 
of men whom Germany can send against the 
Allies, or at any rate the number of adult and 
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