... of socialism which continued to gain ground throughout. Kehr says that of equal, although secondary, importance was the political and military dualism of Germany. The autonomous army, with all its power and traditional support was a constitutionally unsupervised influence on Germany. Comparing the army to the old secret police forces of Russia and Germany, the independence of the army he examines as being the residue of absolutism, with the old seperation of estates and functions, the second being the conflict of Crown and parliament, and finally the means by which the Reich had been unified - war. Moltke's careful disentanglement of the army from Bismarck's sphere of influence in the 1870s is an important issue, as Moltke set the army firmly against the Prussian reformists and allied the army with the army's Commander in Chief - the Kaiser. Army training had as its objective "blind obedience to the Crown". From the ...

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