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Updated: May 6, 2025
Past us, as we sweated there, the slow but surer wagon-trains ploughed forward. One, a German train, stopped beside us to bait their horses officers of the Landwehr or Landsturm type, who looked as if they might be, as doubtless they were, lawyers, professors, or successful business men at home.
Imagine thousands and thousands of Landsturm men moving about and plucking King Albert's face or the black, yellow and red from Belgian buttonholes! No sooner would a buttonhole be cleared in front than the emblem would appear in a buttonhole in the rear.
Throngs of women and children from the filthy villages of the Argonne and the Ardennes gather round our field-kitchens and regularly receive the remains of the meals; while many a German Landsturm man, recollecting his own wife and children, fills the mouths of dirty French children instead of completely satisfying his own hunger."
For the last ten days we have had Prussians there, who were discontented with everything and wanted all the kitchen utensils and everything within reach, but these new men are Bavarian Landstürm, rather nice old things, who have brought all their own contrivances, not the least among them being one of the famous rolling kitchens.
In Greece, which does not signify much for a European war, but might in combination with the small Balkan States prove very troublesome to Turkey, and is therefore important for us, an active army of 146,000 men can be put into the field; there are besides this 83,000 men in the Landwehr and 63,000 men in the Landsturm.
Moreover, the peoples that compose the Empire have been harassed throughout the long course of their history by wars; a large percentage of their youth are serving in the standing army or in the reserves, the Landwehr and the Landsturm; finally the Germans, though not, as it appears to the foreigner, an artistic people, save in regard to music, enjoy the spectacular and the theatrical.
A big, bearded Landsturm man with a kind face was at the pigeon-hole. "I am very late for my train, my friend," I said, "would you get me a third-class single for Düsseldorf?" I handed him a twenty-mark note. "Right you are," he answered readily. "There," he said, handing me my ticket and a handful of change, "and lucky you are to be going to the Rhine.
They reported their forces standing on the defensive here as 50 per cent Landwehr, 25 per cent Landsturm, and only 25 per cent other troops not of the reserve. Repeated attempts of the Russians to gain possession of these fortified positions had, however, broken down.
Some 10,000 men who have passed a certain examination serve only one year and are entitled to certain privileges. Each man in the infantry serves 2 years in the active army, 5 years in the active reserve, 5 years in the first division of the Landwehr, 6 years in the second division of the Landwehr, and 6 years in the Landsturm.
They wanted to burn the bridge at Lorenzen, only the country-folks with blunderbusses, cudgels and pitchforks protected it, and made them run; so they marched on, pursued by the Landsturm, to this fortress, where they fought like devils until many were killed, and the others, at their wits' end, managed to push on to Innsbruck.
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