Duty and Conscience

By Kurt Eggers

Nine tenths of war consist of dirt, of waiting, waiting, waiting...
But the tenth tenth – danger, action, overcoming – is the salt of the earth, which
spices man's daily bread.

Soldier's humor?!

It does not have the least to do with the usual stupid expressions, the dumb jokes
and brainless barracks tomfoolery. It has also never become "literature", just as
little as it is suited to be repeated.

It is the amused, fierce laughter of men who have passed through the greatest
shocks and have the right to comradely pat death on the back.

The close neighborhood with death and danger makes the soldier indeed not
indifferent to the questions of life and death, but become simple and calm. His
calm is often – very unjustly – confused with "unfeeling". The warrior is the German
human being who became significant!

The sole exciting fear that the soldier feels is that of, due to a failure, possibly
becoming despised by his comrades. To have won their respect through the proof
of his competence is his highest satisfaction. The soldier no longer knows the
narrow concept of private bourgeois honor, he seeks in his loyalty to his nation's
honor.

In the daily routine of duty, which plays out far from the public, which awards no
medals and pronounces no praise, the soldier's real bearing proves itself.

The master of war is the thinking and knowing, the political soldier.

The philistine shatters on the brutalities of war's manifestations.

But the stubborn lansquenet also confronts them dumbfounded.

The simplification of life, for which the soldier in war is not, say, educated, which
instead confronts him as compelling demand and seizes him, is the folk's true
fountain of youth, the bodily and – what is more important – simultaneously the
spiritual.

Discipline and drill hold a soldierly community together.
Authority is the backbone of the command.

As important as these demands are, they are out-shined by the greatness of the
personal overcoming, which the soldier summons up, when at the dangerous
moment he pulls himself up for the deed.

In such moments, he grows upward to warrior, to aware bearer of his folk's honor.
The warriordom purified in danger is the alert conscience of the nation; it carries
the front spirit into the homeland and makes it the exemplary and binding
bearing, the life ideal of the youth.

The soldier knows of the necessary folkish duty, that next to the graves of war must
stand the cradles of young life, if a folk does not want to triumph itself to death!
Dying becomes easier for him, if he can think about it that his blood lives on and
that, with this blood, all his yearnings as well remain alive.

Children are the most beautiful heroes remembrance!