ABSTRACT
Bertram's soldiers of modernism' no longer refer to Prussian militarism but evoke a futuristic Nazi Germany as a national body ascendant and beautiful. Bertram's phenomenology of the German future bodies as fine machines takes avant-garde aesthetics as the combined result of political change and technological progress. When Bertram imagined these soldiers of modernism stirring in England, he may have had in mind the increasingly popular physical culture movement as a harbinger of renewal. After the First World War, Britain developed a more inward-looking culture in which men tended towards the domesticated, quiet and reticent. The notion that physical fitness predestines for leadership echoes of course the Social Darwinist principles that underpinned the spirit of the British Empire. The physical strength and hardiness' that inspired The Times correspondent had a more erotically inflected appeal to the pro-German academic Randolph Hughes, who eulogized that the sight of this pale-brown naked flesh was one of the most unforgettable things'.
