The Prussian Officer

“The Prussian Officer” by D. H. Lawrence is part of his collection The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published in London in 1914 and republished in America in 1916.

“The Prussian Soldier” is written in two parts. In the first, Lawrence introduces the two main characters: a Captain and his orderly, both German soldiers. The Captain is an irritable man from a wealthy family who, having lost his inheritance gambling, was forced to join the military to make a meager living to support himself. He is lonely and has never married, but he does take occasional mistresses. His mistresses, though, do not help him to release his nearly constant anger and tension, which he takes out on the orderly throughout the story.

The orderly is the opposite of the captain – he is a loving man named Schoner, which means “more beautiful” in German. Schoner is involved in a relationship with a young woman, to whom he writes often.



The conflict of the story arises when the Captain develops subconscious homoerotic desires for the orderly. Lawrence describes Schoner's effect on the Captain as being “like a warm flame on the older man’s tense, rigid body.” Unable to act on his desires, the Captain relieves his tension by trying to ruin Schoner's relationship with his girlfriend. He keeps Schoner occupied with meaningless tasks and humiliates him when he discovers that Schoner keeps a pencil tucked behind his ear so he can write letters to his lover.

The Captain's tension and aggression build until he is physically beating Schoner by bruising his thighs so badly that he can't walk. Schoner, confused and pained by the Captain's brutal treatment, becomes angry himself. He feels that the Captain is trying to remove any sense of his own freedom and self-respect. After a particularly brutal beating, Schoner finds himself alone with the Captain in the woods. He seizes his opportunity and breaks the Captain's neck over a tree stump.

Shocked by his own behavior, Schoner leaves the body by the stump and flees to the woods, where he tries to come to terms with his behavior. As he wanders in the forest, he is overtaken by dehydration and the physical toll of his beatings and collapses. Later, soldiers find his body and take it to the nearby hospital, but Schoner dies before he can heal. In the final scene in the story, Schoner and the Captain's dead bodies are placed side by side on gurneys in the morgue.



D. H. Lawrence was an English poet and writer. He was born in England in 1885 and died in France in 1930, at the age of forty-four. Lawrence wrote primarily about modernity and industrialization, and the havoc they wreak on the human condition. His stories often center on sexuality, instinct, and emotional and mental health, which made his work unpopular with many during his lifetime. His blatant homosexual themes, present in “The Prussian Officer” and many other stories and poems, earned him a reputation among many critics as a glorified pornographer, though later, many acclaimed writers defended Lawrence's work. Lawrence spent much of his later life in self-imposed exile in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, and the United States. He is most noted for his book Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel about the sexual relationship between a blue collar man and a wealthy, married woman that was banned for obscenity in the U.S., Britain, India, Canada, Australia, and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s.

“The Prussian Officer” is noted for its representation of sexual repression, and the emotional toll it can take on the body, mind, and spirit. Lawrence uses three repeated motifs in the story to build tension between the characters: neck, dryness or thirst, and the color red. These motifs circle around each other, expressing the unspoken desire of the Captain, the building violence between the two men, and ultimately the breaking of the Captain's neck. Lawrence expresses his own belief in the damaging nature of sexual repression by ending the conflict between the two men, not at the death of the Captain, but much later, after both characters have violently perished. In “The Prussian Officer,” sexual repression is fatal for both the object of affection and the man repressing his feelings.

Some critics and biographers believe that Lawrence's writing on sexuality and sexual repression might stem from his own unexpressed homosexuality. Regardless of his sexual orientation, his writing is now noted for its contemporary use of language that was once considered unacceptably obscene, and for his imaginative and visceral descriptions of sexual relationships, emotional turmoil, and violence.