Farmers, chronically short of help, disliking and distrusting the gangs of Polish and Russian seasonal workers that crossed the border at harvest time, welcomed the soldiers. Not only were they honest Germans; they cost nothing but bread and cheese, a little sausage, and plenty of beer. For the officers, harvest duty was reciprocity for an autumn’s hunting and a winter’s dancing, an insurance policy against the next year’s round of rural social activities. For countrymen among the rank and file, harvesting could be a pleasant reminder of their own home villages, particularly if the women were friendly. City boys from Hamburg or Dortmund, marked as aliens by their accents, sweating over unfamiliar implements and unfamiliar tasks, might at least rejoice in a change from the endless routines of drill and spit-and-polish.
The use of soldiers as harvest help symbolized conditions in the German east. In an empire increasingly developing along lines of regional specialization, this area had been left behind. Limited resources, limited capital, and limited markets retarded the growth of industrialization. The agrarian conservatives insisted on maintaining an agricultural system increasingly uncompetitive on a European market. In 1914 the average personal income in the province was about the same as the average for the entire kingdom of Prussia in 1892.
Underdevelopment generated massive emigration westward, to Berlin and the Ruhr, in search of work and opportunities. Almost the entire natural population increase of the Reich’s eastern provinces from 1870 to 1914 was absorbed by this internal migration. By no means was all of it to the factories. Few German villages did not have a native son or two who had made his career as a NCO. Prussian farm boys were highly desired by colonels of regiments in Alsace, the Ruhr, and the Rhineland as sources and models of old Prussian virtues. Enlisted men could expect to be correspondingly well treated on maneuvers or detached service east of the Oder. Clean straw at worst, feather beds at best; good tobacco and better schnapps; an occasional slap-and-tickle with a maid, perhaps a smile from the daughter of the house; and all for the price of listening to the paterfamilias describe his days in uniform, show off his souvenirs, and boast of his sons on the far side of the Reich.1
The army’s position in the east was also influenced by a German-Polish struggle that by the twentieth century politicized the entire region at the grass roots. National conflict enhanced mythologies based on national and religious differences dating back to the Middle Ages. The stakes were small and the issues marginal. Nevertheless the electoral process affirmed and intensified cleavages that seemed to defy political solutions. If no East Elbian politician rose in the Prussian Landtag or the German Reichstag to denounce the projected abandonment of his homeland to Slavic hordes as a result of the Schlieffen Plan, a sense of the eastern provinces as an ethnic and cultural battleground was nevertheless too pervasive to ignore. Social democracy, that bugbear of respectable opinion in the Reich proper, was just visible enough in East Prussia’s home towns to provide a sense of danger for the patriotic societies to exploit at their meetings. But ethnic chauvinism had been comprehensively fostered in recent years by the work of anti-Slav, anti-Polish propagandists for the H-K-T Society and similar groups. While the cutting edge of their work was in Posen and West Prussia, their speakers and pamphlets were familiar in this trans-Vistula province as well.
Nor was this attitude entirely a product of propaganda. The border districts boasted some of the highest crime rates in Germany. Neidenburg, Heydekrug, Niederung—three East Prussian Landkreise were in the top ten of the entire Reich for the years 1903–12. Their common denominator was the possession of significant minorities, Polish for Neidenburg, Lithuanian for the other two. Urbanization and modernization, those often-cited harbingers of disorder, were less significant on the frontier than old-fashioned poverty combined with discrimination. And while efficient municipal police forces and an ever-present gendarmerie could be counted on to keep the lesser breeds in good order under most circumstances, German nationals considered a strong military presence a welcome insurance policy.2
Rather than being stationed in the countryside by squadrons and companies, like British troops in eighteenth-century Ireland or their Austrian counterparts in Galicia, most of the German regiments in West and East Prussia were concentrated. The principal garrisons of XVII Corps were the old fortress cities strung along the Vistula: Thorn, Graudenz, Danzig. Across the river, most of the men of I and XX Corps were stationed in the small- and medium-sized market towns dotting the East Prussian landscape at thirty- or forty-mile intervals: Allenstein, Insterburg, Rastenburg, Lyck. Some could trace a heritage to the days of the Teutonic knights. Others owed their modern existence to the colonization programs of Frederick William I. All sought and welcomed garrisons. In depressed agricultural areas, soldiers were a major source of income. Almost a third of the male wage earners in Graudenz, for example, wore uniforms. Food and forage, construction and maintenance, could be important items in the ledgers of any local business fortunate enough to get army contracts. Generals and colonels were usually politically astute enough to see that the benefits were reasonably widely distributed, even to Polish landowners and contractors with the right patriotic spirit.
The army also offered social variety. In West Prussia, ethnic, economic, and historical factors combined to isolate the towns from the countryside. East of the Vistula, most of the towns were just large enough to make monotony a scourge for their residents. In both cases a garrison’s bands and parades provided public entertainment, while the officers were a welcome addition to circles impossibly narrow in terms of the brighter lights to the west.
The officers themselves frequently had other ideas. At the end of the nineteenth century, service on the frontier was to many officiers moyens sensuels a career-threatening mixture of professional stress and soul-killing boredom. Commanding generals were likely to be fire-eaters who took seriously their task of defending the Reich’s outposts and were correspondingly quick to ensure the premature retirement of anyone failing to measure up to their exacting standards. Gottlieb Haeseler, for years commander of XVI Corps in Metz and the Reich’s most familiar military eccentric, had an equally fearsome counterpart in August Lentze, who from 1890 to 1902 made service in Danzig’s XVII Corps an exercise in anxiety for any officer above the rank of captain. As a familiar Kasino rhyme enjoined:
Assignment to a frontier province meant isolation from both the increasingly attractive civilian social scene and the mainstreams of professional development and professional advancement. It meant years in endlessly monotonous small towns with their one good restaurant, their two or three respectable Gasthäuser, their choral groups and gymnastic associations so difficult for any outsider to penetrate. The universal appellation for these places was Drecknester, “shitholes.” Few officers were convinced by the argument that civilian officials, doctors, and lawyers managed to make quite comfortable lives in such communities. Drinking and gambling, often financed by borrowed money, flourished. Unmarried lieutenants consorted with women of questionable reputation. Married captains seduced each others’ wives. Personal antagonisms bred quarrels, duels, and courtmartials. In the hothouse atmosphere of provincial Germany, the stories lost nothing in the repetition among outraged and titillated civilians. In Gumbinnen, when an officer murdered his unfaithful wife, the scandal kept tongues wagging for years.