BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

old orders, and manage themselves with room enough, they are worth but little.” 9 These
perceived flaws anticipated nineteenth-century “unpolitical” and “methodical” German
stereotypes that presumed German mediocrity and inflexibility, traits contrasted to the British
self-stereotype of innate capacity to govern and “pluck.” In 1893, for example, prognosticators
of an imaginary European “Great War” envisioned “Teutonic courage and discipline” in the heat
of battle, as well as the precision of movement and perfect “mechanism” of German troops and
supply lines, but also the fatal absurdities of German regimentation:
And how bravely those Germans fought! And now, looking back in cold blood, how needlessly
were they butchered! Exactly opposite where I stood, their infantry moved forward with even
more than the precision of a parade; in little squads, but shoulder to shoulder, with all the rigidity
of a birthday review. I could even see the officers halting and actually correcting the alignment.
Needless to say, these living targets were riddled through and through in the very moment of
their pedantic folly. 10
Mockery of “pipeclayed” Germans and their military maneuvers—“the run after a running
foe is the cream of German tactics”—accompanied a serious hope that German “dependence and
docility,” lack of adaptability and staying power would ameliorate the threat of what the world
considered a model army. 11 An article in Cornhill Magazine shortly after the outbreak of World
War I hypothesized that German soldiers, being accustomed to “thinking in grooves” and
9 Machiavelli, “State of Germany,” 267
10 The author, supposed to be an American correspondent, exclaimed, “How the veterans
of our Civil War would have scoffed at this slave-driver’s discipline!” See Rear Admiral
Colomb et al., The Great War of 189_: A Forecast (London: Heinemann, 1893), 274. See also
119, 176, 217.
11 [Linesman], “German War,” Blackwood’s 172 (November 1902): 726-27. Pipeclay,
used to polish swords and other metal soldierly accouterments, also means routine and implies an
excessive fondness for parade-ground drill or attention to correctness in dress. See also ”The
Nightmare of Germany,” Spectator, reprinted in Living Age 212 (January-March 1901): 59-60.
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