National Character and Transnational Professionalism

Abstract

Delving into the writings of British and German soldiers, one constant uniting all periods and authors is that commentaries regarding their foreign allies are almost always couched in terms of their national or ethnic origin. Indeed, whenever descriptions are made of allied or auxiliary forces, be they regiments, armies or merely one or a handful of individuals, they are simply referred to as a collective: as ‘Germans’ or ‘English’. The usage of this language reveals the degree to which men in these multinational armies saw the respective components with regard to their nationality, and in doing so used terms that carried with them not only an indication of their national origin, but a collection of characterizations and stereotypes prevalent in popular discourse. This chapter seeks to examine some of these popular conceptions, with the goal of providing a background and a point of comparison for the personal writings and opinions of soldier-authors. The focus here is on stereotypes and, particularly, the discourse concerning ‘national character’, a term common among the writings of soldiers through which their accounts of foreign soldiery were often filtered and which entailed a set of theories about a polity’s collective psychology and innate traits. This emphasis on national character is relevant to the entire period under examination, but gained more value, and greater emphasis at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the proliferation of nationalism in Western Europe.