CONSCRIPTS IN GERMANY
By THE VERY REV. CUTHBERT BARDSLEY
IT has been decided to allow young conscripts of 18 years to spend almost the whole of their army career in Germany. One finds it hard to believe that the people who made this decision can know the sub-normal condition of Germany today The whole nation sold herself to the devil in the thirties—some people would place it earlier. As a result of that transaction and the inevitable tragedy that followed, Germany today is a nation of people bewildered and frustrated, without faith or hope. To a very great extent her moral values have been perverted. In the midst of our this moral decadence, surrounded by ruin and desolation, is our army.
I would like at this point to pay tribute to the courage and good humour with which the average British soldier, as I have seen him, is facing a very difficult situation. No remarks which I may make later in this article are in any way meant to be a reflection on him. I have the greatest respect for the sanity and common sense of the ordinary man in the "other ranks." I have also a very great admiration for the leadership and sense of responsibility for the welfare of their men shown by the senior officers. It is no fault of the men that Germany is in a low moral condition today. But if untrained and inexperienced English youths are sent out to modern Germany, many of them will return a menace to society and a hindrance to the future greatness of England.
Lord Moran has done our nation a great service by making public the V.D. figures, revealing that " the incidence of V.D. in Germany is five times as great as in the army at home." Two letters have reached me recently, typical of others. The first comes from a lad of 18—a lad who had been brought up in a decent home and exposed to a strong Church education. He writes, " I am faced now with what appears to be a simple way out of the continual tension, and that is to break all the rules which you and others have taught me and to become what I have always looked upon as a bit of a swine." Reactions to this letter will be many and varied, but it does reveal a trend which cannot be ignored by the authorities. Another letter which I reproduce anonymously comes from a wife ; it reads, " I had been very happily married since 1940. Two years ago my husband came home on leave from Germany and found faults with me in little ways he never used to see . . . Things got worse and he came home to tell me he had been unfaithful and that there might be a child. I asked him to come home and start afresh. He would not, but said he was madly in love with this girl and that he proposed to join the Control Commission in Germany. My husband would probably have gone perfectly straight had he not been sent to Germany." This is, of course, just an ordinary letter typical of hundreds of such situations.
What about the condition of our British youth whom we propose to send out there? Most of them have been brought up during the difficult war years, evacuated from school to school. They have not had the same opportunities of regular teaching, and in particular, teaching of the Christian faith, as had their elder brothers and fathers. An experienced padre said to me the other day that they fell into three groups—a minority of absolutely first-class lads ; a small minority of young scoundrels ; while the great majority are just ordinary decent, irresponsible, unformed and undeveloped boys. We now propose to expose these inexperienced youths to the atmosphere of post-war Germany. It will be very difficult for a Commanding Officer to build up a disciplined unit when so much of his time will have to be spent looking after boys straight from school, and endeavouring to shield them from corrupting influences. Further- more, have the authorities thought out the effect which these young trainees will have upon the German people? Germany is accustomed to the sight of a trained and disciplined army. These lads are unlikely to impress the German nation.
It is not for me to say whether twelve months is long enough for them to be trained to any degree of efficiency as soldiers, but it is certainly long enough for their whole sense of moral values to be
• corrupted and misshapen. It has been said that we must have these conscripts because we must have a big standing army. This answer surely reveals a complete lack of vision. In almost every regiment I visited in Germany (and I visited 33) I was told that men who had been demobilised were returning from civvy street, disgruntled and disillusioned with the condition of England today and only too glad to get back to the army. If, as Lord Moran pointed out, they were assured that on their retirement at the age of 35 to 4o work would be found for them, many of these experienced men would stay in the army. Fear of insecurity is one of the greatest causes of the shortage of regular soldiers in the army today.
Furthermore, it has been argued that we must provide the very best possible welfare for the men, which will protect them from being exposed to the dangers of the psychological condition in Germany. But you cannot separate the British soldier from the German people, however good the welfare and spare-time activities. In this con- nection people also say that if the army padre were doing his job the men would be less likely to fall into evil ways. The army padre is doing a magnificent job under intensely difficult conditions. The present Government has made it a ruling that no religious instruc- tion shall be given except to those who turn up voluntarily, a condition under which no army training could be given efficiently. Furthermore, the mind in the army accepts compulsion for all things considered important, but that which is voluntary is considered unimportant. Religious instruction is, therefore, ranked as some- thing wholly unimportant.
Let me repeat that Germany today is diseased ; she is not normal. We do not lightly expose our boys to a school where there is infantile paralysis, but we seem very lightly to be exposing them to a country where there is moral and spiritual paralysis. Prevention is easier than cure. I suggest that we should do everything in our power to prevent these inexperienced lads from having their moral values warped by contact with the evil spirit which is abroad in Germany today.
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