Page - 434 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

434 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 also the Austrian Prime Minister, but they remained for the most part unfulfilled. The question had to be posed again as to which far-reaching things should be uniformly enforced, above all in Hungary. The Army High Command attached particular weight to the pre-military training of the youth. As far as the older school youths were concerned who attended higher classes in secondary schools, the Ministry of Education accommodated the demands of the Army High Command in a decree from June 1915. Henceforth, drill exercises and scouting games were carried out in the framework of lessons in accordance with exact instructions from the Ministry. The more far-reaching proposal for pre-military educa- tion of the entire youth, as far as possible from age ten onwards, remained unfulfilled, however, although the matter had been debated long and hard. Hungary was once more the impediment, resulting in solo efforts being made. Soldier Games ? The addressing of the problem of pre-military youth education built on considerations that stretched well back to the pre-war period.1036 However, what had been viewed be- fore the war above all from the perspective of achieving a better exploitation of military strength and an increased fairness of military service as well as the deployment of ‘youth’ as a connecting link between the nationalities, was now supposed above all to serve the militarisation of youth.1037 The ‘human material’ should be formed as early as possible in order to then be able to deploy it reliably and freely. The decree of the Ministry of Culture and Education from 2 June 1915 was de- signed to reorganise the entire educational system in the sense of a ‘mobilisation’ of the pupils.1038 Resistance emerged against this. Most gym teachers were in favour of it, as were history teachers, but the aforementioned Reichsrat deputy Otto Glöckel very firmly disputed that this was ‘the only or the best way to fortify a nation’.1039 As soon as the resistance among the teachers made itself felt and it was noted that it was a contradiction in terms when attempts were made to strengthen undernourished, poorly dressed and ailing children by means of physical exercises, calls were made for the train- ing of teachers to be revised.1040 The Army High Command had not expected that the teachers would go along with the proposals unquestioningly, since this would not have fitted with the image that it had of them. In the eyes of the Army High Command, primary schools were in any case ‘nurseries of chauvinistic or anti-Austrian sentiments’ and secondary schools ‘strongholds of high treason and anti-militarism’.1041 Criticism of the planned measures was also voiced by the boy scouts, whereas Social Democratic, as well as Catholic and Jewish, youth organisations were more or less willing to support the pre-military education.1042 The Catholic Clergy supported the efforts at militarisa-