GERMANY: Hindenburg

Before the warm glow of his German hearth,, many a citizen of the Deutsches Reich scanned with rage and alarm, last week, the intemperate bombast of the German press, which thundered a warning that the Allied Powers were even then "packing" the Council of the League of Nations against Germany. (See THE LEAGUE, opposite page.)

Only one soothing note was struck: the assertion that Germany's "will to enter the League alone," as epitomized in the inflexible person of her President, must triumph. As youthful Germans crowded about their parents to know the meaning of all these developments, there was told to them again the plenipotent legend of Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und Hindenburg:

"Eine Selbstverstandlichkeit." To begin, the von Beneckendorffs have been for some 600 years among the most respected of the lesser Prussian nobility. By chance, the President's great-grandfather received from his great-uncle (a von Hindenburg) certain landed estates, willed him only on condition that he add the comparatively "nouveau" title of "von Hindenburg" to his own illustrious one. His son, a Prussian officer as a matter of course, married the daughter of an army surgeon. To them was born Paul, a deep-chested healthy infant, who inhaled the atmosphere of Prussian militarism with his first breath (1847).

When he cried, his nursery maid, a former sutler, used to bellow at him: "Silence in the company!" When he went out to play, the family gardener fired the young Paul's imagination with tales of how he had served as a drummer-boy under Frederick the Great. At the age of "eighteen-and-a-half" Paul had won his way through military school to lieutenantship in the Austro-Prussian War. Said he, years afterward, "I made no choice of a profession. To fight was 'the only thing to do,' 'eine Selbstverstandlichkeit'."

"Blut und Schlamm." His joy at his first taste of warfare was quickly conveyed to his family by letter: "I gratified my longings on the battlefield−smelt powder, heard whistling around me projectiles of all kinds−shells, shrapnel, canister, rifle-bullets; I was slightly wounded, thus becoming an interesting person; and I captured five cannon."

None the less, his promotion was slow. He was 47 before he became a colonel (1894) but he had plodded valiantly through Bismarck's Blut und Schlamm (blood and mud). Moreover he had become a valued if not a great tactician and had served as a professor at the War Academy. In 1896 his reward came. He was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the VIII Army Corps, and in 1904 was transferred to command the IV Army Corps−the summit of a German General's hopes in time of peace.

In 1911 he was 64. His friends explained that he retired then, "in good time, to make room for the younger men." His enemies hinted that the temperamental Wilhelm II had evinced displeasure at the way in which he maneuvered his corps. He retired "to my cottage at Hanover" and commenced to write "for my family alone" the memoirs of what he considered a long life.