And so it is. Weapons and army forms are destructible and are replaceable. As great as their importance perhaps is for the moment, just so is it limited when viewed over longer periods of time. What is ultimately decisive in the life of a Folk is the will to self preservation, and the living forces that are at its disposal for this purpose.

Weapons can rust, forms can be outdated; the will itself can always renew both and move a Folk into the form required by the need of the moment. The fact that we Germans had to give up our arms is of very slight importance, insofar as I look at the material side of it. And yet this is the only thing our bourgeois politicians see. What is depressing about the surrender of our arms, at most, lies in the attendant circumstances in which it took place, in the attitude which it made possible, as well as in the wretched manner of doing it which we experienced. It is outweighed by the destruction of the organisation of our Army. But even there the major misfortune is not the elimination of the organisation as the bearer of the weapons we possess, but rather the abolition of an institution for the training of our Folk to manliness, which was possessed by no other State in the world, and which, indeed, no Folk needed more than our Germans. The contribution of our Old Army to the general disciplining of our Folk for the highest achievements in all fields is incommensurable. Precisely our Folk, which in its racial fragmentation so very much lacks qualities which, for example, characterise the English

— a determined sticking together in time of danger — has received at least a part of this, which in other nations is a natural, instinctive endowment, by way of its training through the army. The people who chatter so happily about socialism do not at all realise that the highest socialist organisation of all has been the German Army.