The pursuit of glory, p.78
The Pursuit of Glory, page 78
The late king, by his infinite assiduity, introduced a wonderful order and discipline among his troops, and a precision before unknown in Europe in their motions and manœuvres. The Prussian battalion became a walking battery; the quickness of the charging of which tripled the fire, and made a Prussian equivalent to three adversaries…So many new inventions transformed the army into a moving fortress, the access to which was formidable and murderous.
Moreover, quality was matched by depth. In 1740 Frederick William left an army with a peacetime strength of 80,000, raised from a population of just 2,240,000. This was made possible by the ‘canton system’ introduced in 1732–3, by which each regiment was allocated a district for recruiting. This marked an important step towards the nationalization of recruiting, for all able-bodied males were obliged to register on the cantonal rolls. If the quota could not be met by volunteers, then conscripts were taken. This limited form of conscription was not a Prussian invention-Sweden had been the first country to organize a permanent army based on the principle of military obligation-but it was the Prussians who pushed it furthest. Ludwig Dehio estimated that if the Habsburg Monarchy had made the same effort in 1740, it would have had an army 600,000 strong instead of the 108,000 actually available.
Frederick William also completed the process of social militarization which turned Prussia into ‘not a country that has an army but an army which has a country, in which, as it were, it is just billeted’, as his son’s adjutant von Berenhorst famously put it. This primacy of military policy influenced government policy in every sector. The main beneficiary, of course, were the nobles, who provided the officers. They were given control over their serfs, control of local government, a monopoly of landed estates (so that a Junker could sell his land only to another member of his class), cheap mortgages and subsidies to repair war damage. They also benefited from the preferential treatment given to rural interests when fiscal and commercial policy was determined. The peasantry benefited too, for a regular supply of cannon fodder depended on a tolerable level of existence. In Otto Büsch’s lapidary formulation: ‘Protection of peasants was protection of soldiers’.
It was a militarism which suffused all sections of society. The Junkers and Frederick went through fire together in the three Silesian wars between 1740 and 1763, in which some 1,550 officers perished. If the von Kleist clan was exceptional in losing twenty-three members, including the distinguished poet Ewald, who died of wounds sustained at Kunersdorf, there were several other families whose losses reached double figures. As the wars had ended with Prussia achieving great-power status against all the odds, the survivors were now tied to their war-lord like blood-brothers: as one of his veterans put it, it was a relationship similar to that between a Scottish chieftain and his clan. Frederick set the example of selfless devotion to duty from the top, sharing the privations of his soldiers and requiring the same from the members of the royal family, all of whom were obliged to serve. As Count Lehndorff boasted: ‘what distinguishes our army from all others is that our princes are soldiers themselves, and put up with the same hardships as the private soldiers’. It was a pride shared by civilians, as a French visitor found: ‘The common people in Prussia, even the lowest classes, are permeated with a militarist spirit, they speak with respect of their army, recite the names of their generals, recount their victories and the times they have covered themselves in glory.’ It was an impression confirmed by Prussians themselves, such as Ludwig Tieck, who recorded in his memoirs:
The King appeared at military parades and reviews as the great war-lord, who had defied successfully a coalition of all the rest of Europe, and at the head of his troops, who had won so many battles. When there were military exercises or manœuvres outside one of Berlin’s city-gates, perhaps the Hallesche or the Prenzlauer, then the citizens of Berlin streamed out in their hordes to watch. My father [a master-carpenter] also used to take his children out to these popular festivals. Among the pressing crowds of people, the rush of artillery-trains and the marching soldiers, we were prepared to put up with the dust and the heat for hours on end, just to catch sight of our old Fritz surrounded by his dazzling retinue of celebrated generals.
In short, in the course of the eighteenth century Prussia became a militarized state supported by a militarized society. There was nothing inevitable about this. In 1610 the Berlin militia had refused to obey their ruler’s order to conduct a training exercise on the unheroic if sensible grounds that firing their muskets with real gunpowder would frighten their pregnant wives. It was the Thirty Years War which taught the hard lesson that on the North German Plain, with its lack of natural frontiers, it was a case of ‘eat or be eaten’. It was the series of remarkable Hohenzollern rulers who made sure that it was the Prussians rather than the Poles, Danes, Swedes, Saxons, Bavarians or Austrians who called for the menu. Indeed, even as the eighteenth century began, it was by no means certain that it would be the new kingdom of Prussia rather than some other German principality which would pose the main challenge to the Habsburgs in the Holy Roman Empire, as the following table of troop strengths and their subsequent development, compiled by Peter Wilson, eloquently shows.
Table 11. Militarization of the German Principalities during the 1700s
But militarization was not enough. Prussia could not achieve great-power status until two adjacent rivals had been eliminated: Sweden and Poland. As we know what was to come, it is easy to forget what power the Swedes had wielded in the seventeenth century, when their empire covered much of the Baltic littoral and their armies ranged deep into southern Germany. It is even easier to underestimate the potential of Poland, given its disappearance from the map of Europe as a result of the three partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795. Yet the combination of the Electorate of Saxony with the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in 1697 as a result of the election of Frederick Augustus of the former as king of the latter seemed to offer the perfect match of quality with quantity: Saxony was perhaps the most advanced state in central Europe, while the Polish lands stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. In both cases it was Russia which did Prussia’s work for her. By reducing Sweden to a third-rate power and taking control of Poland in the Great Northern War (1700–21), Peter the Great inadvertently also created the conditions for the rise of Prussia.
As we saw earlier in this chapter, the international situation was unusually favourable for Frederick in the autumn of 1740 but nothing could have been achieved without his intervention. No war has just ‘happened’ simply because the circumstances have been favourable. An act of the will is always required. Frederick’s decision to use the weapon his father had forged and to exploit the wonderfully favourable international situation was, if not the primal deed, then certainly a world-historical moment, after which nothing would be the same again. In his treatise General principles of warfare, written in 1746 and based on his experiences during the first two Silesian wars, Frederick impressed on his commanders the need for ‘short and lively’ wars. As he enjoyed the priceless advantage of unity of command, being both commander-in-chief and head of state, he was able to seek a decisive engagement with a speed denied to his enemies. He also brought to combat a ‘do-or-die’ nihilism which gave Prussian warfare a desperate aggression which more than compensated for any numerical deficiency. On 20 September 1806, just three weeks before Napoleon’s crushing victories at Jena and Auerstadt, Captain Carl von Clausewitz wrote to his fiancée that when Frederick marched off after Rossbach to confront the Austrians at Leuthen in December 1757, ‘he was just like a desperate gambler, determined to lose everything or to win everything back, and (if only our statesmen would take note of this fact!) it is in this passionate courage which is nothing more than the instinct of a mighty character that the highest form of military wisdom resides’. In fact, Frederick’s aggression diminished as the war progressed and the numerical superiority of his numerous enemies began to tell. Rushing from one front to the next in a desperate effort to keep them at bay, he sought to fight a war of position, of manœuvre and small gains. As he himself put it: ‘to win a battle means to compel your opponent to yield you his position’ and so ‘to gain many small successes means gradually to heap up a treasure’. During the campaigns of 1761 and 1762, and again during the War of the Bavarian Succession of 1778, he fought no major battle. As we shall in the next chapter, the French revolutionaries and Napoleon took a great deal from Frederick the Great’s military practice and consequently conquered most of Europe; but they fatally failed to imitate his subordination of military means to political ends.
13
The Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon
1787-1815
THE BEGINNING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS
The wars of the French Revolution are usually dated from 20 April 1792, for that was when the National Assembly in Paris declared war on the ‘King of Hungary’ (which was how the new ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy, Francis, was known until crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in July). In reality, the wars had been underway since 17 August 1787, for it was then that the Turks had imprisoned the Russian ambassador, Count Bulgakov, in the Seven Towers of the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, which was their ceremonial way of declaring war. As Paul Schroeder has sagely observed, it was a war that began ‘as many wars do, from the decision of a threatened defensive power to halt its decline and regain security by violence’. In the same way that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 unleashed a chain reaction that eventually engulfed the world, this action by the Turks was to have momentous consequences.
First, it activated the defensive alliance between Catherine the Great and Joseph II concluded in 1781, which required each party to come to the assistance of the other if attacked by a third party. Although Joseph recognized his obligation at once-the casus foederis in diplomatic parlance-he did so with a heavy heart. As he lamented to his brother Leopold, ‘these damned Turks’ had forced him to wage war in regions where plague and famine were endemic and all for the prospect of very little gain. With the Austrians tied down in the Balkans for the foreseeable future, the way was clear for the new King of Prussia, Frederick William II, to make a name for himself. The opportunity was already waiting, in the shape of the political crisis in the Dutch Republic. This was essentially a re-run of the factional strife that had wracked the country periodically ever since its foundation, between the maritime provinces led by the merchant oligarchs (the ‘Regents’) and the landed interests led by the current head of the house of Orange, who exercised ill-defined executive authority as ‘Stadtholder’. For the past decade or so it had been the former who had got the upper hand, progressively stripping the Stadtholder William V of his powers. In the course of the 1780s a sharper edge entered the contest by the emergence of a group of ‘patriots’ looking for more radical and even democratic reforms, including the total abolition of the Stadtholderate. At the same time the domestic struggle had taken on an international dimension by the Dutch treaty of alliance with France concluded in 1785 and the accession to the Prussian throne in 1786 of Frederick William II, whose sister was married to William V.
Nothing less than the future of world domination appeared to be at stake in this imbroglio. Now that the French had control of Dutch naval bases at the Cape of Good Hope and in Ceylon to add to their existing possessions in the Indian Ocean of the Île de Bourbon (Réunion) and the Île de France (Mauritius), they were very well placed to do to the British in India what they had just done in America, for their rivals had no naval base between St Helena and India. Certainly the British viewed French domination of the Dutch Republic with great alarm, and some at least of the French ministers viewed it gleefully as an opportunity not to be missed. The death in February 1787 of the French foreign minister, Vergennes, also removed a brake on the hawks, led by the navy minister, the marquis de Castries. The Dutch patriots were now encouraged to take complete control of the regime.
The incident that sparked off the dénouement was the arrest on 28 June 1787 of the Princess of Orange by a detachment of Freikorps, the para-military wing of the patriots, as she was trying to make her way to The Hague to rally support there for her husband’s cause. Although she was soon released, the Prussians were encouraged by the British to take advantage of the episode to solve the Dutch problem by force. After much hesitation, they agreed, by now secure in the knowledge that the Austrians would be diverted by the war in the Balkans. Stubborn to the point of folly, the patriots had refused the satisfaction demanded, confident that their French sponsors would honour earlier promises of military assistance. As it was, with the new chief minister Loménie de Brienne vetoing any intervention on financial grounds, the French could only stand by in fuming impotence as their Dutch allies were imprisoned or forced to flee. Once the Stadtholder had been restored to his previous dominant position, the Dutch Republic was duly steered into a new alliance with Prussia and Great Britain (March and June 1788). For the British, the sense of relief was intense. The Dutch navy was back where it belonged (at the disposal of the Admiralty), the threat of French control of the Channel had dissolved and, above all, sea routes to India were safer than they had ever been. George III spoke for everyone when he told Pitt: ‘Perhaps no part of the change in Holland is so material to this country as the gaining of that Republic as an ally in India.’
As the British crowed, the French wailed and gnashed their teeth. To be proved impotent over Poland, the Crimea or even the League of German Princes was one thing, but to be unable to act in one’s own backyard to defend a vital national interest was quite another. When Louis XVI supported Brienne and financial prudence against the hawks, de Castries resigned, as did the secretary of state of war, the comte de Ségur. The latter’s son was almost certainly correct when he wrote in his memoirs:
Our situation was critical: this was the time when our court should have taken bold action; a vigorous and decisive initiative would probably have thrown our enemies into confusion, reassured the Dutch, checked the Prussians, made the Turks see reason, and so would have diverted abroad that turbulence of opinion which was convulsing France and which urgently required occupation outside the country if it were not to provoke an explosion at home.
Speculation on what might have happened, if only this or that had been done, can sometimes be helpful, especially when the exercise is conducted by contemporaries. The military men among the latter were agreed that a golden opportunity had been lost. Lameth, for example, recorded the ‘general opinion’ that stopping the Prussians would have been easy, especially as the Dutch opposition party had offered an immediate grant of 12,000,000 livres. The political benefits of intervention, he argued, would have far outweighed any cost, for whereas a successful campaign would have restored the loyalty of the army, the actual betrayal of France’s allies by the supine ministry had completed its demoralization. Ségur was not the only contemporary to realize that a watershed had been reached: ‘France has collapsed’, recorded Joseph II, ‘and I doubt whether it will rise again’. It is no exaggeration to say that the Dutch fiasco represented the terminal humiliation of the old regime.
As the French monarchy began to lurch towards the abyss, problems were also intensifying for Joseph II. The Turkish declaration of war on Russia had come too late to allow any serious campaigning in the Balkans that year. It was not until 1788 that the war began in earnest. It did not go well for the allies. Despite increasingly desperate pleas from Joseph, the Russian commander-in-chief, Prince Potemkin, stayed resolutely on the defensive. Nor was there any chance that the Russian fleet might appear in the Mediterranean to inflict another Chesme, for the British declined the necessary assistance to transfer it from the Baltic, and a rumour began to spread that the mercurial Gustavus III of Sweden would take advantage of Russian commitments in the south to launch an invasion through Finland (which indeed he did, in July). During the course of a long hot summer, the Austrian army began to fall prey to their oldest enemies-shortage of food and disease. Its inability to seize the initiative was dramatized in August, when a Turkish force broke into the Bánát of Temesvár, inflicting terrible devastation.
The situation was to get a great deal worse before it got better. Joseph’s radical reform programme had alienated a wide swathe of opinion across a wide swathe of his territories. In the Austrian Netherlands in 1787 a revolt had been headed off only by concessions by the governors general-concessions that Joseph promptly denounced and sought to claw back. Encouraged by the outbreak of revolution in France, a full-blown rebellion erupted in the autumn of 1789. With most of the government forces away fighting on the eastern front, the insurgents found it easy to take control of the province. On 11 January 1790 the combined Estates proclaimed the independence of the ‘United States of Belgium’. By this time, Joseph II was on his death-bed, finally succumbing to tuberculosis on 20 February. When his brother and successor Leopold arrived in Vienna the following month, he found his inheritance apparently in a state of dissolution. Belgium was gone and it looked very much as if Hungary was about to go the same way.
These troubled waters naturally attracted the attention of Frederick William II, flushed with the success of his Dutch conquest. Now that the British were deeply in his debt, the French were paralysed by revolution and the Russians preoccupied by a two-front war, the moment seemed to have come to settle accounts with the Habsburg Monarchy once and for all. In August 1789 Frederick William decided to launch an invasion in the spring of the following year to accelerate a dissolution that seemed to be already underway and to pick up the pieces. Among other things, he proposed to create an independent Belgium and an independent Hungary, the latter to be ruled by a Prussian client, the Duke of Saxony-Weimar. Alliances were negotiated with Poland and the Turks and an army of 160,000 was massed in Silesia. As if that were not enough, the Spanish got ready to claim their share of the spoils in Italy.
