The joint propaganda previously put out by the Prussian government and capitalists now sounded unbearably grating.
For all this time, the people of Prussia had been told to endure, not to be as weak and lazy as the heretics next door in Austria; the capitalists would hold up the spine of the nation.
Yet when war came, that so-called national spine collapsed at the first touch. Several hundred thousand men were gone in an instant. Not only could the Prussian government not accept it—the people of Prussia could not accept it either.
Those hundreds of thousands had all been men in the prime of life. Behind them stood hundreds of thousands of families.
Yet they found it difficult to hate the Austrian Empire, because from the perspective of ordinary people, the Austrians had merely been defending their homeland and rescuing their allies. Prussia, on the other hand, was the invader.
What active defense, what offensive defense—through the eyes of common folk who knew nothing of military affairs, barging into someone else's home was an invasion.
When it rained, it poured. Sweet-talking ordinary people had always been second nature to them, but the defeated nobles happened to step forward and accuse the capitalists of supplying shoddy military goods that had harmed the soldiers. They even produced that incomplete horseshoe as evidence.
Moreover, according to the defeated nobles, most of the personnel factory owners had sent into the army were physically deformed or riddled with illness, utterly incapable of handling the intensity of the battlefield.
In truth, the Junkers believed Prussia had lost because the people had not sacrificed enough. But in the eyes of the people, it was the lords above who had squandered their sacrifices.
If Prussia had not lost, the people would have remained at the stage of protests