The German Genius

egotism he defined as “subjectivism become proud of itself.” He thought there was “something diabolical about its courage, something satanic in its courage,” amounting to a “moral disease.” 38 He thought German Idealism had inherited from Protestantism an earnestness and pious intention, that notions of the spirit or will resembled the notion of Providence. He dismissed Kant because he did not live up to his beliefs, that though he was mild-mannered himself, “his moral doctrine was in principle a perfect frame for fanaticism.” 39
    Hegel, he thought, had retracted all belief in a real world and set in its place his knowledge of it—a “monstrous egotism” that enabled him to pass off the prejudices of his time and country “as the real thing.” This was the wrong way round, making things conform to words, not words to things. 40 He felt there was something “immature” about German thought (Nietzsche in particular): “They have not taken the trouble to decipher human nature, which is an endowment , something many-sided, unconscious, with a margin of variation, and have started instead with the will, which is only an attitude …” 41 “Ideal” aims, he said, were not necessarily “higher” than personal ones, indeed they were more likely to be “conventional humbug.” He pilloried the absurdity of Hegelianism by paraphrasing its message, saying that history had begun in Eden and had its end in Berlin. Nietzsche he dismissed similarly for using an abstraction, the Will to Power. But “what power would be when attained and exercised remains entirely beyond his horizon.” 42 He described German philosophy as a work of genius but then qualified it in this way: “Idealism simply overlooks the all-important fact that our whole life is a compromise, an incipient loose harmony between the passions of the soul and the forces of nature.” 43
    B ETTER F IGHTERS , W HO L OST THE W AR
     
    So far then, in this account of World War I, the German genius has taken rather a battering. But there are other ways of looking at the events of 1914–18 and in his study of the German army and general staff, A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807–1945 (1977), Colonel Trevor Dupuy concluded “that the Germans, uniquely, discovered the secret of institutionalising military excellence.” Particularly in World War I, Dupuy showed that although Germany was on the losing side, its defeat was due to superior numbers of the enemy and that, in most battles, and man-for-man, the Germans were better fighters. 44
    During World War I, the Germans mobilized about 11 million men and suffered almost exactly 6 million casualties. Against Germany alone, the Allies mobilized roughly 28 million men, more than two-and-a-half times as many, and casualties against Germany (ignoring Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria) totaled about 12 million. “Thus on average each mobilised German soldier killed or wounded slightly more than one Allied soldier; it took five Allied soldiers to incapacitate one German.” On the other hand, the Germans were more often than the Allies in defensive positions, and experience shows that troops on the defensive have the advantage of position, fortification, and so on, with research confirming that defensive positions are, roughly speaking, 1.3 times as efficient as attacking ones. Taking this into account, Dupuy concluded that “there was an overall German superiority of 4 to 1 in inflicting casualties.” 45 In a parallel study, Alexander Watson reported that the percentage of Krankheiten des Nervengebiets in the German west field army and nervous disorders in the British army, were 3.67 and 3.27 respectively, though the overall psychiatric casualties among the British battle injuries was 6.54 percent. 46
    In the end, the superior numbers of the Allies proved decisive (and the Germans were outperformed in the activities of intelligence and spying), but, man-for-man, German soldiers were better fighters.
    Dupuy carried out his studies as part of the Historical Evaluation and Research Organization (HERO), looking at some sixty engagements in World War II, mainly in 1943 and 1944, later extended backward to World War I. He was particularly concerned to show that the Germans were not especially militaristic. 47 Between 1815 and 1945, Prussia and Germany participated in six significant wars (two of them minor), whereas during that time France was engaged in ten significant wars