On the psychology of the Seven Years’ War

But people say: whatever the results of the Seven Years’ War were, the war itself, the fact that a German Prince by almost superhuman genius was able to maintain himself for seven years against a world of enemies and beat all the enemies of the Empire who had been rampaging through Germany for so long, the Russians, Hungarians, French and Swedes – this fact rekindled the national spirit of the German nation, or at least of its Protestant majority. And indeed a view of this kind comes closest to what Goethe said about ‘higher meaning’. But it is questionable whether people at the time looked at the matter in that way, whether Frederick’s ‘patriotic warlike deeds’ inspired them with the national spirit from which our classical literature is supposed to have sprung.

For the King himself, this conception, had he read it, would have been about as comprehensible as the language of the Iroquois. His best quality, his serious and sober grasp of things, always saved him from boasting. He wanted nothing more than to be a warlord of his age, and that was all he was. Certainly, ideological excesses have recently had a certain echo even in Prussian military literature. For the last ten years, a violent feud has been waged in that literature, not exactly to the credit of the classical military state. It is over whether Frederick brilliantly anticipated his age by fifty or a hundred years and applied the Napoleonic strategy, which sees its first and only goal in the rapid destruction of the enemy army in battle, or whether he fought the wars of his own century, those cautious, slow, methodical wars, which sought to gain an advantage against the enemy by destroying the magazines destined to supply his armies, by denying him this stretch of land or that fortress, by trying to manoeuvre him artificially out of the field with ombrages (deceptive manoeuvres), and diversions (feints), by regarding battle only as an extreme measure, a sort of last resort, only to be used in cases of extreme urgency, or if a very great advantage could thus be achieved in a very safe manner. Now it requires no very great consideration to see what is the correct view. The Napoleonic strategy rests on the people’s army, skirmishing tactics and the requisition system. Its prerequisites are mass armies, which advance rapidly, skirmishing, which means fighting on any terrain, and requisitioning, which means being able to supply yourself directly from the population. The army of the last century was, on the other hand, a mercenary army, which as such was tied down to linear tactics and supply from magazines. Because of the expense of recruiting, it could not grow beyond a certain size. It could only be brought up to the enemy in rigid lines, held together by the threat of flogging or a bullet at the hands of the officers, and it could thus only fight on the open plain, to a certain extent as a sort of automatic shooting machine. Indeed, the rapidity of mass fire, which Frederick finally got to six shots a minute with a further loading for a seventh shot, became the main object of military training. Finally, it had to be closely guarded in camp and correspondingly supplied by its commanders. Its movements were tied down to the magazine and the bakery, and thus its mobility was very limited. If Frederick had tried to use Napoleonic tactics and sent his mercenaries out skirmishing, his army would immediately have run away to all four corners of the globe. If he had sent his mercenaries out to requisition supplies, he would, in the drastic words of a recent military historian, simply have turned at least half of his army into robber bands.

The psychological impossibility for Frederick of adopting Napoleonic strategy was almost larger even than the practical. Not even in a dream could he have stumbled upon the idea, any more than he could have thought of installing a field railway or a field telegraph. Even the greatest military genius cannot invent a new strategy, which in the last analysis is determined by economic development. The Napoleonic strategy is not called by that name because it was invented by Napoleon, but because it reaches its highest level of perfection in the Napoleonic wars. It arose quite spontaneously in the American War of Independence. There, the British mercenary armies faced hordes of rebels who were fighting for their own interests and therefore did not desert like enlisted troops, who did not drill, but could shoot all the better for that with their long rifles, who did not therefore attack the English in lines on the open plain, but in swarms of sharpshooters in the cover of the woods. It is high praise for Frederick to say that he followed the American war very closely in order to learn from it. It sounds moreover very ironic when he writes, on the 3 November 1777 to his brother Heinrich: ‘We are observing the Washingtons, the Howes, the Bourgoynes and the Carletons in order to learn from them this great art of war, which is inexhaustible, in order to laugh at their stupidities and to approve of what they do according to the rules.’ But he seems to have become dubious nonetheless about the infallibility of these ‘rules’ and he seems to have seen the sense to a certain extent of Washington’s ‘stupidities’, for shortly before his death he ordered a few battalions of light infantry to be formed from native-born Prussians, ‘people who know what they are doing’, who are to learn how to use the terrain, who are to receive a freer and more mobile training, in short, more of a rifleman’s training.

In this Frederick was a well-informed military theoretician for his day, and far in advance of all of his officers. They did not even understand the new strategy when they had to deal with it physically – when in the French revolutionary wars of the nineties hastilygathered hordes of peasants defended their social interests against the émigrés who returned with the Austrian and Prussian mercenary armies, in the same way that the American hunters and farmers had fought against the English mercenaries. Goethe recognized the sign of the times with the prophetic gaze of the poet when he told the Prussian officers after the cannonade at Valmy : ‘From here and today a new epoch of world history is starting, and you can say that you were there.’ His hearers did not understand him; but one should not hold that against them, for Goethe himself felt, rather than understood, what he said. How else could he have discovered, twenty years later, a ‘higher meaning’ in the Seven Years’ War? But even accumulated experience did not enlighten the Prussian officers. The mercenary armies remained tactically superior to the French volunteers in every encounter for a long time, and still France could not be beaten. There was no getting round the fact, although its causes could not be discovered. Finally it was treated as a senseless monstrosity that made a mockery of all received military knowledge but which would have to be accepted for better or for worse. Therefore a renowned General of the Frederician school, the Prince of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, in 1794 recommended a treaty with France. He said that no favourable result could be expected from continuing the war with France, since ‘you are never finished with fools.’ Simultaneously an official Austrian memorandum expressed itself in exactly the same way: ‘In the normal course of events’ the French would already have been beaten, but they were always breaking out again with ‘fearful violence’, like a ’raging torrent’. Indeed, even in the wars of 1813 to 1815, of all the Generals of the European Coalition, except for Scharnhorst, who died young, only Gneisenau was able to master the Napoleonic strategy thoroughly. He had to put up the sharpest fights, particularly with his Prussian subordinates, the Bülows and the Yorks, and in the same way he was a thorn in the flesh of the allied Monarchs, whose military advisers, Knesebeck on the Prussian side and Duka and Langenau on the Austrian side, were still deeply rooted in the military outlook of the eighteenth century. In court circles he and his staff were derided as ‘Wallenstein’s Camp’. Even at Waterloo, the linear tactics of the English army were still put to practical use, quite logically, since the army consisted of enlisted mercenaries. But it too would have lost at Waterloo were it not for the timely arrival of the Prussians under Blücher and Gneisenau. It was only decades later that the Prussian army absorbed the Napoleonic strategy into its flesh and blood through the classical writings of Clausewitz, and a Prussian General answered the idle chatter about the Prussian schoolmaster who was supposed to have won the battle of Königgratz with the fitting words: ‘Yes indeed, the schoolmaster was called Clausewitz.’

The ‘genius’ of the great military commander is a peculiar thing altogether. In Anti-Dühring Engels describes how, at the battle of St. Privat , where two armies with essentially the same tactical formations were fighting, the regular company columns on the German side dissolved into dense swarms of sharpshooters under the fearful fire of the French chassepot rifles, and how in the vicinity of the enemy rifle fire the soldiers moved only at the double. He then continues: ‘The soldier had once again been cleverer than the officer; he had instinctively discovered the only tactic which up to now has proved to be of any value under fire from breech-loaders, and carried it out successfully despite all the efforts of the command.’ That sounds very disrespectful, but in a slightly different wording, and certainly without any plagiarizing from Engels, the Prussian General Staff says the same thing, when it reports, through the mouth of one of its most gifted members, on the French revolutionary wars of the previous century: ‘It is most significant that skirmishing among the French troops of the day was in no way prescribed by the rules, for these were in all their essential features the same as the Prussian ones. The dispersed battle order of the French had not been ordered but came into being; a necessity had been made into a virtue, and because it corresponded with real conditions it became a power.’ Marx’s proposition that ‘not men’s consciousness determines their being, but on the contrary their being determines their consciousness’ emerges in a very clear light in the field of military history. The more powerful and the more direct is the contact with being, the faster and the more clearly does consciousness develop. In war, the soldier will generally feel reality and instinctively act in accordance with it much faster than the officer, and the highest ‘genius’ in the military commander consists in recognizing the inner reasons for the soldiers’ instinctive behaviour and acting decisively in accordance with this recognition. How hard that is even for Generals of great repute we can see from the reports and memoirs of Carnot, Dumouriez, Hoche, Gouvion St. Cyr and other officers who had to organize the volunteers of the French Republic and lead them in the field. According to these testimonies, which were later so zealously exploited in order, despite 1813 and 1814, to exclude the native element of the Landwehr as much as possible from the Prussian army, the volunteers were not much better than Falstaff’s rogues in buckram, and yet the model troops of Austria and Prussia broke on the dam that these apparently so hopeless hordes threw in their path.

Military history only becomes comprehensible when it is traced back to its economic bases. If, on the other hand, one tries to make the greater or lesser ‘genius’ of the military commanders into its motive lever, it evaporates into historical romance. The better-educated generals of the eighteenth century knew very well what a marvellous thing a nation in arms was. Count zur Lippe and the Marshal of Saxony both said so openly, as did Frederick, even as Crown Prince, in his Anti-Machiavell. There he says: ‘The Romans knew nothing of the desertions without which an army today is inconceivable. They fought for their hearth, for everything that was dearest to them; so they did not think of frustrating this great purpose by cowardly evasion. But with our people it is quite different. The burghers and the peasants do, it is true, supply the army, but they do not go into the battlefield themselves, the soldiers have to be taken from the dregs of the people and chained to the colours by the harshest violence.’ One can if one likes call it ‘genius’ that Frederick and other warriors of his age saw through the whole fragility of a mercenary army, but this ‘genius’ changed nothing in the strategy and tactics of mercenary warfare, and even theoretically it was of so little significance that the learned strategists of great military powers did not understand a nation in arms even when they met one face to face in an extremely practical course of instruction.

With the revolution in economic conditions, the structure of the army was also revolutionized, and it is in the nature of things that the practice of the mass adapted itself much more quickly to the changed circumstances than the theory of the individual. This was why the officers learnt from the soldiers and not the soldiers from the officers. It was American and French peasants who invented the strategy of the nineteenth century, and old Ziegler was speaking to some purpose when he said in a military debate in the German Reichstag that the so-called experts always made a mess of things. They have always made a mess of things when they have tried to place their military expertise higher than the logic of economic development. Frederick achieved his successes by adapting to the mercenary army as the only one that was possible in his day, although he knew the advantages of the peoples’ army very well. After his death, the expert officers of his army, irrespective of their personal military talent, suffered the greatest variety of fates, depending on whether or not they could adapt their expertise to the changed economic conditions, and whether or not they could learn from the soldiers.

Captain von Steuben and Major von Berenhorst were among the most important officers on Frederick’s staff during his later years. Both experienced the ‘disfavour’ of the King, who always distrusted intellectually-outstanding officers, and left the Prussian army. Steuben went to America where, as we know, he rendered great service to the military organization of the rebellion. As early as 1793 he told a German visitor there, the military writer von Bülow, that the French volunteers, about whose military abilities their own officers could meanwhile not complain enough, were waging the same kind of war as the American farmers, and that they would be just as invincible. Berenhorst did not re-enter military service, but wrote his famous Betrachtungen über die Kriegskunst (Considerations on the Art of War), in which he subjected Frederick’s army to a sharp criticism which has been fully justified by subsequent experience. Of Frederick he said very aptly: ‘He knew very well how to use the machine, but not how to make it;’ he scathingly criticized the ‘extremes of coarseness, harshness and slavery to the service’, ‘the micrology and the minutiae of the art of the parade’. Yet this incisive observer understood so little of what it was really all about that even two years after the Battle of Jena he could still write that ‘tactical genius’ would have to invent a ‘superior remedy’ in order to defeat the Napoleonic style of warfare.

Our conception is reflected even more clearly in the careers of two famous Generals. If ever the Prussian army had a military commander and organizer of genius, who rose by his own ability and despite the intrigues of the Junkers and his own peasant birth to the highest military positions, but who nonetheless kept a heart that was open to the people and kept himself free of the taint of the military moustache, it was Scharnhorst. In the decade before the battle of Jena, he worked with the maximum effort on the reform of the Prussian army but, living in the midst of that army, he remained caught up, despite all his theoretical study of Napoleon’s campaigns, in Frederick’s strategy. It was not until the autumn campaign of 1806, when he actually saw the French troops manoeuvering, in the last moves before the battle of Jena, which he as Chief of the General Staff of the Prussian Supreme Commander had to command, that the scales fell from his eyes. He immediately attempted to imitate the superior tactics of the French, but of course without success, given the condition of the Prussian army. No military ‘genius’ could hope to avert the shattering defeat of that army. But Scharnhorst’s real genius now busied itself in recognising the real relationship of things, in not counting on ‘genius’, but in putting the Prussian army, in seven years of almost superhuman struggle against the incredibly narrow-minded King and the incredibly selfish Junker class, on that economic basis that enabled it to fight successfully against the French army. Scharnhorst, like his friends, Gneisenau, Boyen and Grolman encouraged the liberation of the peasants at least as energetically as Stein, Schön and Hardenburg.

But in the shameful retreat after Jena, Colonel York and his regiment distinguished themselves in the successful actions at Altenzaun and Wahren. They were the only successes, and small ones at that, that the Prussian army won in that whole campaign. York beat the French detachments that were pursuing him by using their own skirmishing tactics. Now York was Scharnhorst’s opposite in all respects. He was an officer of the old school, who would have preferred to leave Frederick’s army intact down to the last gaiter-button, a morose, choleric exponent of the most iron discipline, a Kashubian Junker with the most narrow-minded class prejudices. But he had served his way up the ladder of promotion in that battalion of light infantry that Frederick had ordered to be set up shortly before his death, and if, in general, this battalion had not been able to escape the conditions of life of the Prussian army as a whole and accordingly soon became the same strictly-drilled troops of the line as all the other battalions, there was still one regiment in the army which stood on more or less the same economic basis as the French army – that very regiment of Jüger (riflemen) of which York had been appointed Colonel a few yeas before Jena. The regiment had been formed by Frederick during the Silesian wars in order to have at least a few highly-mobile troops to fight the Croats and Pandours in the Austrian army. For this purpose it could not, understandably, be made up of foreign mercenaries and underfed peasants, but had to be composed of people who were bound to the colours by their own personal interests. It was therefore recruited solely from skilled huntsmen, the sons of senior and junior foresters and other officials who obtained the prospect of a post in forestry through service with the regiment. Such people could not be beaten into goose-stepping; even at royal revues they were allowed to march past in comfortable swarms. While peace lasted the regiment, which had done very good service during the war, thus became the laughing-stock of all Frederician gaiter-buttons, who called it ‘an old baroque gable’ left over from the past in the magnificent facade of this magnificent army. The regiment had become a military curiosity, and York only took over command with the greatest reluctance. But since he was nonetheless a capable and ambitious officer, the practical experience of daily service made him realize that the only way to make something out of these troops was to treat them with respect and train them in open order tactics. The social being of the soldiers determined the military consciousness of the officer. And this consciousness was extinguished immediately when, as a result of his successes at Altenzaun and Wahren, York was promoted to a level in the hierarchy where he could have some say an the army reforms. Then he flowed over with gall and wormwood; then he was so spiteful in his denunciations to the King that Scharnhorst fell into a nervous disease that almost cost his life; then he gloated over the dismissal of Stein, which Napoleon had ordered, saying that a thoughtless head had been stamped upon and that the rest of the brood of vipers would now dissolve in their own poison. Indeed, even as a corps commander in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814, York, with his ideological and theoretical illusions, placed the most difficult obstacles in the way of Gneisenau’s Napoleonic conduct of the war, whereas the being of the Landwehren (territorials) under his command determined his military consciousness to the extent that Blücher was able to boast of him that no one was harder than York to bring into battle, but that once there, no one got his teeth into it like him.

These few examples, which could be supplemented at will from Prussian military history, or any other for that matter, will suffice for the purpose for which they are quoted. It was extraordinary enough that from his theoretical study of the American War of Independence, Frederick had some presentiment of the approaching revolution in warfare and made a sober attempt to meet it, but for that very reason it was practically and psychologically impossible for him to anticipate in his mercenary wars, the strategy and tactics of Napoleon. Seen in the light of day, the ideological school of history is more dangerous, precisely for the Great Men it seeks to inflate beyond all human measure than it is for anybody else. It has been said very correctly in the debate over Frederick’s strategy that his campaigns, measured against the standards of Napoleon’s strategy, appear very botched. In this, too, Frederick’s real importance lies in the fact that he understood how to be completely clear about what was permitted to him and what was not permitted, what he could do and what he could not do. In a certain sense, one must even say that the fearful burden of the Seven Years’ War fell on him because, irrespective of his intentions, he achieved a success of Napoleonic proportions which, exploited with the means Napoleon had at his disposal, would have finished the war at a stroke but which, since Frederick could not produce that kind of Napoleonic stroke, became a fatal setback. His plan of campaign for 1756 was primarily invalidated because the Saxon army succeeded, by the skin of its teeth, in concentrating on the clifftop camp at Pirna , so that Frederick had to waste a lot of very valuable time starving them out. The decisive reason for its failure, however, was that on May 6, 1757, Frederick stunningly defeated the Austrian army and threw two thirds of it back into the fortress of Prague. From now on Austria, it is true, appeared defenceless. Prague was bound to fall and then the way to Vienna lay open, apart from a weak reserve army which was approaching under Daun. But when Frederick faced this with part of the forces investing Prague at Kolin on June 18, he suffered a severe defeat that forced him to retreat immediately from Bohemia and thus abandon all the successes he had achieved at Prague.

An entire literature has now grown up on the subject of the battle of Kolin, which seeks to prove that, if General Manstein had not committed this mistake and Prince Moritz of Dessau the other, Frederick would have won the battle and, after the fall of Prague, which would have been inevitable under these circumstances, would have immediately marched on Vienna to dictate a Treaty under the walls of the Austrian capital. Clausewitz meanwhile has put an end to this literature with a single stroke of his pen by explaining that, if Frederick had not failed at Kolin, he would have been bound to fail elsewhere, for, given the military conditions of the day and the extent of his military means, it was impossible for him to conquer the Austrian capital or overthrow the Austrian state. The correctness of this observation is so clear that even Frederick’s mythologists have had to accept it. Their only objection is that if Frederick had won at Kolin, the Austrians would have been so paralysed that they would have signed an immediate peace. But if we are to get involved in this somewhat airy argument at all, we ought rather to start from the supposition that the extent of the Prussian success would not have discouraged the Viennese but encouraged them. Maria Theresa and Kaunitz were quite clever enough to let the King stifle in his own fat. By imputing superhuman qualities to their hero, the creators of the Frederick myth make him seem smaller than he really was. Frederick’s actual plan of campaign, which was frustrated by a surfeit of success at Prague, has recently been made public from the English archives, from the papers of the English diplomat, Mitchell, accredited to Frederick. The plan simply aimed at seizing Saxony and a piece of Bohemia in the autumn of 1756 to gain bargaining power, and it rests on the psychologically quite acceptable hope that the Austrians and the Saxons would then withdraw from a match which had become so much the more difficult for them. While this modest plan does honour to the King’s insight into his position, the suggestion that he tried to strike and win in the Napoleonic manner would mark him as a pure Don Quixote.

With the battle of Kolin, Frederick had been thrown back upon the defensive, although admittedly not completely. After the victories at Rossbach and Leuthen he attempted, in the spring of 1758, one more advance into Moravia in order to secure, in the shape of the fortress of Olmutz, a surety that could be traded in return for a treaty. But Daun and Laudon forced him to raise the siege and manoeuvred him out of Moravia. The rest of the Seven Years’ War was nothing more than the destructive rage of battle in Saxony, Silesia, the Mark and Pomerania. It lacked even that appearance of dramatic, heroic excitement that is still attached to the year 1757. What Frederick suffered in the years that followed with his chin up and, as Lassalle says, ‘poison in his pocket’ deserves all our respect, and it would deserve all our admiration too, if the prize of the struggle had been an advance in human culture, and not simply the strengthening of a militarism that was hostile to all culture. But the creators of the Frederick myth do a disservice to the King’s real importance when they present him as the overwhelming genius and the enemy commanders, even indeed his own Generals, as more or less incompetent. What kind of great art would it have been, then, to defeat Daun and Laudon? In reality these Austrian commanders stand up well in comparison with Frederick; they were his inferiors, not in personal ability, but in another connection which Clausewitz has depicted very well in the words: ‘The commanders who opposed Frederick the Great were men acting under orders and, for that very reason, men whose chief characteristic was caution; their antagonist was, to put it briefly, the God of War himself.’ This hits on the salient point, the particle of truth from which the legend of Frederick’s Napoleonic warfare has sprung.

It was a difference, not of kind, but of degree. Frederick waged war in the same way that every commander of the last century had to wage it, but he waged it more boldly because he had a more unlimited control over his military means – more unlimited in the military as well as the moral sense. Frederick was not bound by any orders and he had no responsibility to fear. Whether he was, from the military point of view, the most important military commander even only of his own day, is still very much open to question. According to the testimony of his adjutant, Berenhorst, he was always disturbed and disconcerted during battle, not to mention the spiteful remark that the very unlovable Prince Heinrich used to love to make at his table in Rheinsburg: ‘My brother really had no courage.’ Daun and Laudon gave the King many a rebuff that he could well have avoided. The first plan of campaign for the Seven Years’ War came from Schwerin and Winterfeldt. Seydlitz won the battles of Rossbach and Zorndorf. Despite his greatly more favourable circumstances, Frederick never led any campaigns that were as consistently successful as those of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick and his Confidential Secretary Westphalen. Prague and Leuthen were, it is true, entirely his own, but then so were Kolin and Kunersdorf. Only someone who did not have to face responsibility for the latter crushing defeats could risk the fortunes of war on the former crushing victories. This is what Clausewitz meant by the ‘God of War’. Or, to translate this mythological comparison into the language of our capitalist age: Frederick was the boss who himself speculated on the Stock Exchange, while the Dauns and the Laudons were only the business managers who always had to ask the boss before they could risk the whole capital of the business on the fall of a single card. In the prevailing state of communications, it was usually weeks before they got an answer, and it was usually as much good as a kick in the teeth, given the complete changes in the situation in the meantime. Here, however, where Daun and Laudon were inferior to the King himself, they were the superiors of the Prussian generals, who regularly lost as soon as they had to fight on their own responsibility – with the single exception of the battle of Freiburg, which in Napoleon’s judgement Prince Heinrich would also have lost if he had been faced by a real army instead of the miserable imperial troops. The Prussian generals risked their necks if they lost a fortress or a battle, which understandably did not make them more heroic but more cautious, whereas Maria Theresa judged her generals’ defeats more leniently, which of course in her powerful position she could afford to do.

Moreover, the comparison with capitalism that we drew just now is by no means as unfitting for the wars of the last century as it may at first glance appear. Wars of royal intrigue in appearance, they were in fact wars over trade, and we have indeed already indicated the considerations of trading policy that determined the course of the Seven Years’ War. The essential nature of the wars however also placed its stamp upon the manner in which they were waged. They were so to speak a matter of calculated business finance. One knew more or less the financial means, the treasury and the credit of one’s opponents; one knew the size of his army. Significant increases of financial and military resources were excluded in time of war. The human material of the armies was more or less the same everywhere; and it also had to be used in the same way everywhere, that is to say with great care, for once the army was shattered a new one could not be created, and apart from the army there was nothing. Nothing or next to nothing, for even more valuable in the last analysis than the last soldier was the last taler with which one could enlist a new soldier. Thus success in these wars rested essentially on an exact and certain estimate of the war budget, and in this connection Frederick’s words, which we have already mentioned, that the last taler is the decisive factor in victory, are seen in their true light. They are so correct for their age that they remained true even when, as in Frederick’s case, that last taler was counterfeit. Frederick did not survive the Seven Years’ War by virtue of his victories, for in the last two years he did not fight a single battle, and his writings speak of the battles he fought from 1758 to 1760 with a modesty that puts his admirers to shame and almost with apology. On the contrary, he saved himself and his crown by exhausting his own country to the limit, by sucking Saxony fearfully dry, by English subsidies and by – debasing the coinage.

A continuation of the Thirty Years’ War indeed! The coin clippers of the seventeenth century were in great demand, however much Frederick personally despised this old princely industry. He was really ashamed of it, and had his counterfeit coins struck on Polish and Saxon dies, (indeed the ‘Polish’ eight groat pieces remained as a scourge on the Prussian population until the introduction of the German national currency) or brought a few of his royal brothers under God’s grace, like the Prince of Anhalt Bernburg, in order to decorate his bits of tin and brass with their paternal countenances. But it was to no avail; money, money and yet more money was, in Montecuculi’s apt words the one and only sinew of war in those days. And we must also not overlook the fact that Frederick was not at first driven by necessity to what he shamefacedly called his ‘industry’. Even before the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, the King signed a contract with the three Jewish coiners Herz Moses Gumpertz, Moses Isaak and Daniel Itzig for the coinage of small change, in order to wage war abroad without spending much precious metal. As necessity increased, the currency became worse and worse, and thus the greater part of the peoples’ hatred and execration has fallen on Frederick’s last Jewish coiner, Veitel Ephraim. It was also very unkind of Frederick to pay his mercenaries and subjects in the debased coinage, but to demand that they paid him in good money; in this way he took all the good money out of the country to coin it into bad money; it was only when good money had entirely disappeared that, in 1760, he permitted the royal treasury to accept the debased coinage as well ‘as a special favour’. His most daring enterprise however was to pay back in the debased currency after the closure of legal cases the deposits that had been paid into court in good money by the parties involved. If the parties to the case, who had been so shamefully deceived in their faith in Prussian justice, complained about it, all the legal authorities needed to do was profess ignorance.

Now it is clear that, since the wars of the last century despised all moral authority, they could have no moral effect on the minds of the people and could awake no national spirit. They could no more do that than the Gumpertz, the Isaaks, the Itzigs and the Veitel Ephraims could be the precursors of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. But we must still, nonetheless, test two further claims that have recently been made by patriotic historians in order to preserve the reputation of the Seven Years’ War, despite all, as a national peoples’ war. First the Free Battalions and particularly the Land Militia that Frederick raised are said to have been the germ of the later Territorials (Landwehr). But one only has to put oneself into Frederick’s position for a moment to see that nothing can have been closer to the King’s interests than preserving the war’s character as a war of royal intrigue fought by mercenaries, and that nothing could have been more hateful to him than calling up the masses. Not only would he have been infinitely inferior militarily to the huge populations of his opponents, but he would also have had more to fear from the armed peasants of his own country than from any power on earth. And however impossible a mass call-up actually was given the state of military organization in those days, Frederick nevertheless carefully stamped out any spark that could have lit a fire of that sort. It did indeed happen that here or there the peasants took up their pitchforks and their scythes, not out of enthusiasm for Frederick and his Junkers, but to defend what little they possessed from being plundered and their wives and children from being dishonoured by the enemy mercenaries who had invaded the country. But then the King immediately ordered them to remain true to their inheritance and not to get mixed up in the war, or he would treat them as rebels. When the inhabitants of East Friesland resisted the French invasion and found that they had bitten off more than they could chew, he replied contemptuously to their complaints that he would have done just the same as the French. President Kircheisen even had to forbid the citizens of Berlin, on pain of severe punishment, to take up arms when, in 1757, the town was occupied for a short time by the Austrians. Frederick avoided with the greatest care anything that could have given the war a ‘higher’, a ‘national’ meaning, and he had to if he did not want to give up his goal once and for all.

It is obvious from this that the Free Battalions and the Land Militia that Frederick set up in the Seven Years’ War must have been something very different from what recent Prussian historians claim. These troops did not fight out of enthusiasm for King and Country; they were not better elements than the usual mercenaries. On the contrary, they consisted of the dregs of the human resources that Frederick could use only in the most extreme emergency for military purposes. In his Principles of Tactics he says of those Free Battalions that, in attacks on fortified positions, they should be placed in the front ranks and should go straight for the enemy ‘in order to draw his fire and perhaps disorganize his troops. Whatever happens regular infantry must always be placed behind the Free Battalions to force them, out of fear of the bayonet, into a spirited and pressing attack.’ And Frederick further says: ‘In battles on the level plain the Free Battalions must be placed on the end of that wing which is refused to the enemy, where they can cover the baggage. These royal instructions for the use of Free Battalions contain simultaneously the most exhaustive and the most annihilating criticism of these troops. Frederick had seen at Kolin and elsewhere what destruction the excellent Austrian artillery had wrought from fortified positions on his attacking infantry; the Free Battalions then were to be driven forward at the point of the bayonet purely as cannon fodder, to give as much cover as possible to the attack of the regular infantry, and in the process there would ‘perhaps’ be the advantage that in their desperate situation these desperate elements might do a little damage to the enemy. On the open plain, on the other hand, where the Prussian infantry could develop its full force, the Free Battalions are to be posted as far as possible from shot and shell in the least dangerous position where they can do no harm and may even do some good by covering the baggage. They were simply the most unserviceable elements in the army and, according to all the reports that we have received about them, consisted of the scum of humanity.

The verdict on the Land Militia is morally better but militarily worse, if possible. Frederick ordered them to be set up after his heavy losses at Prague and Kohn, when he had to send for the regular troops from the Mark and Pomerania but did not wish to leave these provinces totally defenceless against the advancing Russians and Swedes. It was to be led by discharged officers and for its upkeep a Land Militia tax and a Land Militia excise were imposed on the country in addition to all its other burdens. The difference between the army and these troops, however, was one of degree rather than kind. They were raised and trained in the same way as the army, but the material was very much worse. They consisted of peasants who had fled to the towns, impoverished burghers, who would otherwise have starved to death, prisoners of war, invalid soldiers and regular recruits for military service who had not yet entered the army and were in this way secured from being carried off by the enemy. Their military effectiveness was inconsiderable, and anyway they had as little to do with a nation in arms as any part of Frederick’s army.

The second claim that is supposed to confirm the ‘national meaning’ of the Seven Years’ War is based on the idea that the war saved the spiritual freedom of Protestantism etc. We have already seen the reality behind this claim, but here too it is said that, be that as it may, the world saw Frederick as the hero of Protestantism and, consciously or unconsciously, that was what he was. The King made religion a very important item in his military calculations, that much is certainly correct. But let us just ask how. In his ‘General Principles of War’, his standing instructions, which he handed over to his generals for strict observance in wartime, he says:

Is it not thus clear that Frederick’s unsuspecting soul was totally innocent of the conscious or unconscious championship of ‘Protestant freedom of conscience’ that he is supposed to have displayed during the Seven Years’ War? Still they say the world fell for the whim of recognizing him as such a champion, and then the patriotic magic lantern is always ready to project the picture of the Austrian Marshal with his consecrated hat and sword onto the screen. But the whole thing is very peculiar. Frederick did, it is true, make a great effort from time to time to play the ‘role of the defender of the Lutheran religion’, not just for the benefit of Saxony but of the whole of Germany, or, as he says elsewhere, ‘to make even those burst out in anger who have the slightest inclination to Martin Luther.’ To this end he had a number of forged documents prepared by the Marquis d’Argens, among them particularly that papal brief in which the Pope is supposed to have rewarded Marshal Daun for the capture of Hochkirch with the award of a consecrated hat and sword. Frederick also tried to make fun of his opponent, who was by no means his inferior, in a most unkinglike manner as the ‘man with the consecrated cap’. (By the by – although the Austrian government immediately announced that the whole story of the consecrated hat and sword was an invention, and although this invention has been exposed dozens of times since in the most convincing and extensive way, it still lives on unflaggingly in the Prussian history books. In comparison with the staying-power of the Prussian patriotic fable one is tempted to look on Egyptian mummies almost as mere mayflies.) But this ‘no-popery’ performance was aimed not at the nation, but at the smaller German courts, and not just the Protestant ones either. There is no doubt that, on the Austrian side, there was in the Seven Years’ War a certain tendency, weakened and limited as it was, to try once more to spread Habsburg papal domination over the whole of Germany. The French diplomats at the German courts reported to Versailles that even the Catholic Imperial Estates were worried about ‘German liberty’, and that it was urgently necessary to make public announcements to belie these fears. The Austrian government defended itself repeatedly against the suspicion that it wanted to break the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia, although the suspicion grew to a certain extent spontaneously out of the whole situation, and it was a clever diplomatic move on Frederick’s part to feed it. He was also not unsuccessful. At the Imperial Diet of Regensburg, the unanimity of the Protestant Imperial Estates prevented the ostracism of Frederick that the Austrian court demanded, and if the Imperial Army turned out to be even more pathetic than it ought to have been given the decayed state of the Empire, this was because most of the Imperial Estates, Catholic and Protestant alike, only supplied their badly equipped troops with the greatest hesitation and unwillingness. To this extent Frederick had every reason to tell the Marquis d’Argens that his anti-papal forgeries were worth as much to him as winning a battle. The only thing is that here he was thinking only of the moral effect on the courts, and not at all of the nations. And even in this his success remained within specific boundaries. The smaller German courts were much too anxious to make independent decisions for themselves. Some of them, who lived too close to Frederick for comfort, combined security with profit and sold or hired their subjects as auxiliaries to England, which, formally speaking, was at war only with France and not with Austria or the German Empire. It is to be hoped that no ‘higher meaning’ for the Seven Years’ War can be found in this trade in human beings.

This war, like all the other wars of the eighteenth century, in its military-economic nature, was basically no concern of the civil population. And this too was the general conception that contemporaries had of the Seven Years’ War. Among his impressions Frederick wrote: ‘The peaceful citizen should take no notice when the nation is fighting.’ Lessing wrote in his first Literary Letter: ‘I would prefer to entertain you with the sweet dream that in our more moral times war is no more than a bloody process between independent chiefs, which leaves all other classes undisturbed and has no further effect upon science than awaking new Xenophons, new Polybiuses.’ And Clausewitz writes on the wars of the eighteenth century: ‘In their means as in their ends, they became more and more limited to the army. The army with its fortresses and a few prepared positions became a state within the state, within which the warlike element slowly consumed itself. The whole of Europe rejoiced at this tendency and held it to be a necessary result of spiritual progress. Although this idea was mistaken ... this change had nonetheless a beneficial effect of the peoples. It must not be forgotten, however, that it made warfare even more a mere concern of the government, and made it even more foreign to the interests of the people.’ There are three classical testimonies all at one go, but let us nevertheless add a few more significant facts.

When Frederick, in winter quarters at Leipzig, discussed German literature with Gottsched, he dedicated a French ode to that ‘Saxon swan’ and Gottsched answered publicly in a poem of quite excessive flattery, which ended with the words ‘and your admirer remains Yours truly.’ Lessing scoffed very loudly at this stupidity, but no one at the time was the least put out by the fact that a professor of the Elector of Saxony thus publicly flattered the conquerer of his country, the deadly enemy of his sovereign. What would be infamous high treason today appeared then to be quite natural, or at the most laughable for its lack of literary taste, so much did the civil population consider itself to be unconcerned with the facts of war. The correspondence Lessing had while he was living in Leipzig with his Berlin friends Moses Mendelssohn and Nicolai is also very informative. The year 1757 was the only year in the Seven Years’ War that could give rise to a certain hero-worship. The mightiest battle of the century at Prague, then the sudden reversal of fortune at Kolin and finally, out of the depths, the quick rise to the merry victory at Rossbach and the brilliant victory at Leuthen! What must Frederick’s soul-mate and fellow-revolutionary Lessing and the Brandenburg-Prussian patriot Nikolai have written about that in their letters, in the pure delight of their hearts! Well, to tell the truth – actually nothing. In their correspondence of the year 1757 one finds extensive discussion on the theory of tragedy, all sorts of hair-splitting over grammatical obscurities in Klopstock’s Messiah, consultations about the printing and publication of the Library of the Arts which the Prussians Mendelssohn and Nicolai finally brought out with a Saxon publisher: but about the war? Nothing. Unless you think that Lessing’s report that the poet Ewald von Kleist has been promoted Major in an infantry regiment in the Leipzig garrison, or Moses’ teasing that Lessing must have been recruited by a Prussian press-gang, since he delays so long in answering, amount to something.

Nevertheless, if Lessing and Moses, who were among the most advanced elements of the bourgeois population of Germany at the time, were in general completely indifferent to the war, it is obvious that they were already beginning to see what was wrong with the ‘mistake’ that Clausewitz talks about – but not in the way that the theory of a ‘higher meaning’ would have us expect. In Lessing’s remarks about the ‘sweet dream’ that we quoted above a certain doubt is already evident, which is seen even more clearly in the immediately preceeding sentences. They run: ‘Peace will return once more without them (the Muses); a sad peace, accompanied by the sole melancholy pleasure of weeping over lost riches. Draw back your gaze from that gloomy prospect. One must not make a soldier pay for his inevitable business by showing him its pitiful consequences.’ And Moses writes exactly the same thing to Lessing in 1757, asking him to leave Leipzig as a place of disturbance, affliction and general desperation: ‘Come to us, in our lonely garden house we will forget that the passions of humanity are laying the globe waste. How easy it will be for us to forget the worthless squabbling of avarice if we can continue face to face our debate on the most important matters that we have started in our letters!’ Remarkable that when these spokesmen of the bourgeois classes take a critical look at the Seven Years’ War they are full not of sympathy but of antipathy! Remarkable, or perhaps not! For the illusion that the bourgeois population was not concerned with the war could only last while that population totally lacked self-consciousness. Along with that self-consciousness there inevitably arose the recognition that they alone were to bear the cost of the war, and that the ‘beneficial effect’ that seemed to be a ‘necessary consequence of spiritual progress’ was bought precisely at the cost of any ‘higher meaning’. The Seven Years’ War could not leave the bourgeois population indifferent, and did not leave them indifferent, but to the extent that it aroused any sentiment in them at all it was a sentiment of disgust, not a sentiment of bourgeois self-consciousness or of national pride. The bourgeois contemporaries of the Seven Years’ War could no more draw such a sentiment from it than Frederick could conduct his wars according to Napoleonic strategy. Merely to imagine such a relationship was impossible until the struggles of the American and French revolutions had given war a completely different form and content, and it was in fact only under the fresh impression of the age of the Napoleonic wars that Goethe ascribed to the Seven Years’ War a significance that Frederick’s wars did not, and simply could not, have for his bourgeois contemporaries.