Franz continued.
"As for the language issue you mentioned, officers should naturally learn the nation's official language. We cannot hold officers to the same standards as ordinary soldiers.
The Fifty Essential Terms for the Battlefield alone are nowhere near enough for commanders. If they are unwilling to make even that small effort, then they can continue being soldiers.
And you should know very well that many of the instructors at our military academies are old generals who retired from the battlefield.
Isn't it a bit excessive to make these elderly gentlemen learn other languages just to coddle those young people?"
Franz raised a hand, and Mia immediately went to the cabinet, retrieved a document, and handed it to Benedek.
"This is an assessment report on implementing a multilingual teaching model in military academies."
Benedek was immediately astonished and began leafing through it.
Naturally, he was not the only one who had entertained such ideas. The Austrian Empire's ethnic and language issues had always been a tremendous headache.
But precisely because of this, Franz could never permit such divisive conduct. In every nation, ancient and modern, discipline and unity were regarded as the foundations of an army—Hollywood films excluded.
If officers were allowed to divide themselves into groups by language, would that not be indulging separatism?
Franz put it bluntly: what he wanted was a group of loyal soldiers capable of fighting hard battles, not to cultivate a pack of LGBT+ overgrown babies.
And absolute equality for everyone was simply impossible—at least in the nineteenth century.
There were too many ethnic groups in the Austrian Empire. Even for linguists, mastering every language would be extraordinarily difficult.
More frightening still, every region had its own dialects. Were the military academy instructors supposed to learn them one by one as well?
Would teaching