Scenes from the Daily Routine of the Old Army - Cavalry - Foot Combat
The Drill Regulations for the Cavalry of 03.04.1909 (Berlin 1909) comment on fighting on foot. It says in principle: "Only a unit that masters the firefight takes up the carbine with confidence. A foot engagement undertaken with half a heart contains the seed of failure in itself" (p. 149).
Here in an uncovered open firing line, i.e. under the conditions of a maneuver or an exercise.
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The military held an outstanding social position in the Empire, and its affairs largely escaped political control. The German Emperor was the supreme commander of the German army, and Wilhelm II (1859–1941) had internalized this role to a particular degree. The socially critical writer Theodor Fontane once (1897) made the following perceptive remark about this monarch: "He has a million soldiers and also wants a hundred armored ships — he dreams (and I shall credit him highly for this dream) of a humiliation of England. Germany shall be on top, in everything and everywhere. All of this — whether it is wise and feasible, I leave undecided — touches me sympathetically and I would willingly follow him on his tightrope, if I saw that he ... had the right balancing pole in his hands. But he does not have that. He wants, if not the impossible, then at least the extremely dangerous, with the wrong equipment, with insufficient means. He believes he can achieve the new with the very old, he wants to erect the modern with junkroom weapons. He provides new must, and because he no longer treads the old hoses, he simply wraps these old hoses with ever-thicker twine and thinks: now it will hold. But it will not hold ... What the Emperor presumably intends cannot be achieved with “weapons” at all; all military efforts seem to me as if in the year 1400 all force had been directed to make knightly armor bulletproof — instead one finally arrived at the only correct solution, to discard the armor entirely"1.