FREDERICK II (1712-1786). Known as Frederick the Great. King of
Prussia, 1740-1786. Frederick the Great returning from Manoeuvres. Oil, 1787,
by Edward Francis Cunningham.
WAR OF THE BAVARIAN SUCCESSION
So far, so good, but the long-term prospects for Frederick’s
Prussia were alarming. The army’s performance had been dismal, as many of the
participants recorded. “The Prussian army bears no resemblance to what it was
before. There is no life in the generals and as for the officers, they are all
demoralized and nowhere can the least order be found” was one verdict. Prince
Henry complained that several of his subordinate generals were unfit for
service and simply a burden: von Britzke was eighty years old and physically
unable to go to war; Lossau had been carrying a bullet in his head since the
battle of Torgau in 1760 and had no memory; old age made Kleist immobile; three
of the major-generals were well over seventy; the general supposed to be
commanding the rearguard could only travel by carriage; and so on. The quality
of the rank-and-file was also thought to be deteriorating, not least because
increasing numbers of native Prussian subjects were exempted from military
service. For all his emphasis on the need for service and duty, Frederick could
never bring himself to clear out the dead wood—and neither could his successors
until the catastrophe of 1806 forced their hand. Queen Luise famously remarked
after that event that Prussia “had fallen asleep on the laurels of Frederick
the Great,” but in reality it was Frederick who had dozed off after 1763. In
1767 he wrote to Prince Henry that the Seven Years’ War had “ruined the troops
and destroyed discipline” but that he was making good progress in restoring the
situation and that in three years everything would be back to normal. The
campaign of 1778 disproved that forecast. During the second half of his reign
the size of the army increased but there was no equivalent qualitative increase.
NAPOLEONIC DISASTER
By the time of the War of the First Coalition the Prussian
Army was still by and large identical with the one of Frederick the Great.
Recruitment was based on regimental districts and was confined to the lower
classes and the peasantry. Additionally, “foreign” (non-Prussian, though
usually German) mercenaries were needed to bring the Prussian Army to the
astonishing peacetime strength of nearly 230,000 men (out of a population of
8.7 million). Officers were taken almost exclusively from the nobility and
gentry (Junker) so that the army replicated and reinforced the social structure
of rural Prussia, while the towndweller stood aside. Far from being a national
force that could rely on patriotic feelings for the motivation of its soldiers,
the Prussian Army, like many others under the ancien régime, had to enforce
discipline mainly by threat of brutal corporal punishment, and desertion was a
constant problem. Service was for life; in reality that usually meant twenty
years, unless invalided out.
In spite of suggestions primarily of junior officers to
implement more progressive concepts, the unreformed army also relied heavily on
linear tactics to exploit the massed musketry of its heavy infantry.
Innovations like more flexible tactics, light infantry, permanent divisions or
corps of mixed arms, and a general staff in the modern sense of the word were
known and discussed, but by the 1790s not yet implemented or still in their
infancy.
The Prussian army had not merely been defeated; it had been
ruined. In the words of one officer who was at Jena: ‘The carefully assembled
and apparently unshakeable military structure was suddenly shattered to its
foundations.’ This was precisely the disaster that the Prussian neutrality pact
of 1795 had been designed to avoid.
The relative prowess of the Prussian army had declined since
the end of the Seven Years War. One reason for this was the emphasis placed
upon increasingly elaborate forms of parade drill. These were not a cosmetic
indulgence – they were underwritten by a genuine military rationale, namely the
integration of each soldier into a fighting machine answering to one will and
capable of maintaining cohesion under conditions of extreme stress. While this
approach certainly had strengths (among other things, it heightened the
deterrent effect upon foreign visitors of the annual parade manoeuvres in
Berlin), it did not show up particularly well against the flexible and
fast-moving forces deployed by the French under Napoleon’s command. A further
problem was the Prussian army’s dependence upon large numbers of foreign troops
– by 1786, when Frederick died, 110,000 of the 195,000 men in Prussian service
were foreigners. There were very good reasons for retaining foreign troops;
their deaths in service were easier to bear and they reduced the disruption
caused by military service to the domestic economy. However, their presence in
such large numbers also brought problems. They tended to be less disciplined,
less motivated and more inclined to desert.
To be sure, the decades between the War of the Bavarian
Succession (1778–9) and the campaign of 1806 also saw important improvements.
Mobile light units and contingents of riflemen (Jäger) were expanded and the
field requisition system was simplified and overhauled. None of this sufficed
to make good the gap that swiftly opened up between the Prussian army and the
armed forces of revolutionary and Napoleonic France. In part, this was simply a
question of numbers – as soon as the French Republic began scouring the French
working classes for domestic recruits under the auspices of the levée en masse,
there was no way the Prussians would be able to keep pace. The key to Prussian
policy ought therefore to have been to avoid at all costs having to fight France
without the aid of allies.
In the aftermath of the shockingly unexpected defeats at
Jena and Auerstädt (fought simultaneously on 14 October 1806) at the hands of
Napoleon’s Grande Armée, the Prussian Army collapsed almost completely. Of its
sixty regiments of infantry, most of which had seen a continuous existence of
up to two centuries, fifty-one dissolved or went into captivity, never again to
be rebuilt. That collapse-and the Treaty of Tilsit (9 July 1807), which reduced
Prussia’s population and territory by half-forced the country to disarm
radically, burdened it with crippling indemnities, and triggered the series of
so-called Prussian Reforms (Preussische Reformen). Taken together, they
attempted a complete overhaul of state, economy, army, and society to make
Prussia fit for survival in the nineteenth-century struggle of nation-states.
