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In 1913 the young D. H. Lawrence wrote a story about Prussian militarism. Its first title was “Honour and Arms”; we know it as “The Prussian Officer.” It was received with the praise it deserved as a profound criticism of a form of brutality for which Prussianism became a synonym. There seems to be nothing extraordinary about its genesis; it was the product of sensitive, first-hand observation.
Lawrence was traveling in Bavaria with the woman who was later to become his wife, Frieda von Richtofen Weekley. There his experiences with Prussianism were numerous and varied. Frieda's father, the old Baron von Richtofen, was a retired officer, a man who assumed that Prussian discipline was the sine qua non of manliness. Frieda herself had told him of what she had seen of Prussian army life. In addition to this several notorious instances of brutality had aroused indignation throughout the Reichstag: the “Zabern Affair,” in which an officer had sabered a lame cobbler, and the rumors about the overt and suppressed homosexuality that were prevalent in the Prussian army at the time.
It was such cases as these that Sandor Ferencsd alludes to in his essay of 1914 on homoerotism, where he writes: