The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Read online

  The elder Steuben’s exalted rank entitled him to bring family members along on campaign. He took Friedrich with him. The boy was just about at the right age to begin a military apprenticeship: he celebrated his fourteenth birthday while observing his father at work directing the Prussian engineers as they laid siege to the ancient Bohemian capital at Prague.

  According to Major von Steuben’s directions, blue-clad engineer troops carved carefully mapped parallel trenches with pick and spade, zigzagging rough concentric circles around the Austrian outerworks; artillery commanders sited their mortars and heavy siege cannon. Young Friedrich was hooked—by the smoke and the noise and the excitement, by the respect that his father’s office carried, and by the great responsibility that his father bore for the king. There was no doubt that he wanted all this for himself, but the engineering service was not enough to satisfy his already considerable ambition. One could rise only so far in the so-called “technical” branches, the engineers and the artillery. The real glory, and the real chance for advancement, lay instead in the infantry.

  So that was the path he chose. Friedrich von Steuben’s military career began almost as soon as the war was over. In the autumn of 1746, right around the time of his sixteenth birthday, he donned the blue coat with rose-colored cuffs, white waistcoat, and skimpily cut white breeches of the Infantry Regiment von Lestwitz (Regiment Nr. 31), one of the units that made up the Breslau garrison. Like all aspiring officers in the Prussian army, Friedrich had to serve time in the ranks before he could qualify for his commission. He started out as an officer cadet (called Gefreiten-korporal or Freikorporal in the infantry). Officer cadets were in an uncomfortable position. They were considered NCOs while on duty, carried the company colors when on maneuvers, and had to demonstrate thorough familiarity with drill and military routine. Though not yet officers, they were nonetheless discouraged from fraternizing with other enlisted men. After two and a half years as an officer cadet, Steuben was promoted to ensign (Fähnrich), “a strange intermediate rank which offered many of the burdens but few of the privileges of a full officer.” Not until he was twenty-two did Steuben rise to the lowest fully commissioned rank, that of lieutenant.11

  The Prussian system of promotion and training was doubtless one of the more intimidating conditions of service for young officers. Yet it had its advantages, chief among them that it helped to cultivate the mixture of reserve and care with which Prussian officers were expected to treat the rank and file entrusted to them. Several years spent in the nebulous space between officers and enlisted men taught the officer cadets and the ensigns to appreciate the burdens of a private soldier’s life. An officer was responsible for the physical welfare of each of the men under his command, and could not shirk his duty of training them. High-ranking officers would conduct daily drills themselves, even at the battalion level, a feature of the Prussian army that foreign observers found both strange and admirable. Even King Frederick did not consider himself above this duty. He frequently led troops in drill, without any pomp, wearing his plain black hat and unadorned regimental coat, cuffs encrusted with the snuff he perpetually indulged in. Leadership, perhaps, cannot be taught, but the Prussian system came closer to doing just that than any other method of officer training used in a European army during that period.12

  For the ten years that followed his enlistment in 1746, Friedrich von Steuben remained stuck in the garrison at Breslau. As an infantry lieutenant, he was kept perpetually busy. A captain commanded each infantry company, but the lieutenants were the real workhorses. Steuben’s daily activities included leading his company in hours of drill, keeping a watchful eye on the discipline and cleanliness of his men, maintaining the company’s accounts and other paperwork, supervising the distribution and cooking of rations, and all of the other elements of the stultifying but necessary routine that made up life in the peacetime army.

  Steuben’s life in the army was not all work. He loved the theater, and attended plays when time and budget permitted, but mainly he devoted his off-duty hours to study. While most of his comrades whiled away their little free time in gambling, drinking, and frequenting brothels, he taught himself basic arithmetic and mastered French. The latter was a vital discipline for an ambitious man in his line of work. A man—or woman—in mid-eighteenth-century Europe could not claim to be truly cultured unless he or she read, wrote, and spoke French, for that was the language of learned Europeans and of those muckraking, troublemaking social critics of the Enlightenment, the philosophes. It was also, curiously, the language of the Prussian king and his court. Any officer who aspired to great things in the Prussian army would have to be fluent in French. Steuben felt perfectly at home with the language, though his own French prose would always be inelegant and workmanlike.

  Lieutenant von Steuben was popular with his fellow officers and loved hearing of their comical misadventures with prostitutes and tavernkeepers, but he rarely partook of the same. Next to his soldierly duties, reading was his chief joy, and his tastes in literature were quite broad. Although raised a Calvinist, he spent little or no time with the Bible or devotional works, and he was sufficiently open-minded to admit that he found Catholicism more sophisticated and intellectually engaging than his own creed. He read widely in military science, but he enjoyed philosophical works and fiction equally. He acquired a vast and detailed knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman history, and he steeped himself in the latest writings of the French philosophes, especially Montesquieu. His favorite author was Cervantes, Don Quixote his favorite book.13

  If young Steuben had a significant flaw, it was carelessness in financial matters, which could be a serious problem for a poorly paid officer. His regimental commander noted that while he was “clever,” he was “not capable as a manager”—a verdict that would be equally applicable to him in his later years. But this did not compromise his performance as a leader of men. Evident early on was the tender concern with which he treated the soldiers under his command and his conviction that a good officer should share the hardships and perils the enlisted men had to suffer. In the summer of 1754, his company was detailed to dig trenches through an actively used cemetery outside the city walls of Breslau. As his men toiled in the oppressive heat, choked by the noisome stench of recently disinterred bodies, Steuben fretted over their health. “I fear for my poor soldiers,” he confided to a friend. “As yet I have no sick [men], but I fear the month of July. In order not to alarm them, I am continually at work, notwithstanding my disgust for this abominable occupation.”14

  He was also ambitious, and he ached for action. He would not have to wait long, for in the south, war was brewing. Empress Maria Theresa had been biding her time, waiting for the chance to avenge herself on Prussia and reconquer the lost province of Silesia. After Austria concluded a defensive pact with Prussia’s former ally France, in May 1756, King Frederick decided that the time had come to take preemptive action before his enemies could mobilize. That August, he sent sixty-three thousand troops crashing across Prussia’s southern frontier and into neutral Saxony. The strike eliminated a potential threat, but inevitably sparked war with Austria. Prussia’s act of overt aggression also alienated nearly all of Europe except Britain. By the spring of 1757, Russia, France, Sweden, and many of the German states had rallied to Austria’s side.

  The ensuing conflict, the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), was no mere dynastic squabble over titles and scraps of land. Maria Theresa and her allies, fearful that Frederick the Great had become a loose cannon whose continued existence threatened the delicate balance of power in Europe, aimed at nothing less than the defeat, humiliation, and dismemberment of Prussia. For Prussia, the war was a struggle for the very survival of the kingdom; for the army of Old Fritz, it would be the ultimate test of its abilities.15

  As an officer in the Lestwitz Regiment, stationed close to the theater of war, Friedrich von Steuben would soon be part of that life-and-death struggle. Hoping to knock Austria out of the war with a single crushing bl
ow before France and Russia could come to its aid, King Frederick pushed more than one hundred thousand troops from Saxony into Austrian-held Bohemia. Stunned, Austrian forces fell back to the heavily fortified city of Prague, where Frederick and most of his army struck them on the morning of May 6, 1757.

  The Lestwitz Regiment, including twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant von Steuben, was part of the initial Prussian assault on the thickly defended Austrian center. The attack, launched across a treacherous and boggy no-man’s-land, was bloody and fruitless, but the superior generalship of King Frederick and his lieutenants allowed the Prussians to exploit a widening gap on the Austrian left. As the Austrian army reeled from the swiftly delivered and unexpected blow, the solid remainder of Frederick’s crack infantry battalions rolled up the Austrian right flank and pushed the enemy back in disarray to shelter behind the city walls of Prague.

  Steuben had seen his first real action—coincidentally, on the very same fields where he had so intently watched his father at work nearly thirteen years before—and his baptism by fire could not have been more terrifying. Overall the Prussians lost more than 20 percent of their strength on the sodden ground at Prague that May morning. Steuben’s regiment suffered more than most. As the young lieutenant strode, sword in hand, before the neatly dressed ranks of his company, urging them forward during the first assault, his regiment practically melted into the ground behind him. Austrian musketry claimed 50 percent of Lestwitz’s men in the attack. Among them, seriously wounded but still alive, was Friedrich von Steuben.

  HISTORIANS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION frequently assert that Washington and his Continentals faced, in the British army, the greatest army in the world. It has become part of the mythos of the Revolution, for it underscores the unlikelihood of American victory: that citizen-soldiers ultimately defeated not just a large and powerful foe, but the largest and most powerful foe. To contemporary observers, however, there could be no doubt: the single greatest fighting force in Europe was the Prussian army under Frederick the Great. Its brilliant victories in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, often against incredible odds, inspired admiration from friend and foe alike, and military thinkers all over Europe sought desperately to unlock the secrets to Frederick’s success. The British, like the French, the Austrians, and the Russians, had fallen under the spell of the warrior-king of Potsdam.

  The Prussian army was not without its shortcomings. It was not the largest army in Europe; its weaponry was not the most technologically advanced; and the kingdom provided for its soldiers in a most ungenerous fashion. King Frederick’s miserliness was legendary: Prussian uniforms were skimpy and poorly made; rations, even in peacetime, were barely adequate. Few if any armies paid their soldiers more poorly than did Prussia’s. Only in corporal punishment, administered in liberal doses to disobedient soldiers, could the Prussian army be described as generous. Mostly because of its size, the army counted nearly as many major defeats as it did victories, and in the end, Prussia survived the Seven Years’ War mostly because its most dangerous enemy, Russia, defected in 1762.

  Yet the Prussian army was great in spite of all these failings. Its greatness came from its professionalism, its hardiness, and the machinelike precision with which it could maneuver on the battlefield. It wasn’t that there was anything remarkable about the raw material from which the army was fashioned. Taken individually, Prussian soldiers were no better or worse than their peers in other armies. It was the quality of leadership that mattered, and Prussian officers were, on the whole, dedicated professionals devoted to their craft and to their arbitrary, often misanthropic, king. Ultimately, credit for the success of the Prussian army must be given to Old Fritz. The king took a keen interest in the most minute details of tactics and maneuvers, and in the education of his officer corps. He insisted upon constant drill and exercise for all branches of the service. The cavalry arm improved immeasurably under his tutelage, as did the artillery—undoubtedly the best in Europe at the time. The infantry, however, was the heart and soul of the army, and it was upon his foot soldiers that Frederick lavished his greatest attentions.

  In the “linear tactics” employed by eighteenth-century armies, success depended on two qualities in the infantry: first, the ability of individual soldiers to load and fire their muskets quickly and efficiently, combined with the restraint to withhold their fire until commanded to unleash it by their officers (a concept known as “fire discipline”); second, the ability of the infantry battalions to change formations precisely and without losing cohesion, even in the heat and fury of battle. The latter quality was necessary for an army to change from column of march to line of battle, even in the face of the enemy. Speed of fire allowed the Prussian infantry to maintain something resembling a continuous rolling thunder of musketry. Prussian infantrymen were trained to load and fire not only in stationary lines, three ranks deep, but also while marching rapidly forward or in retreat—no small feat, given the limitations of the flintlock musket. A musketeer in the Prussian army was expected to be able to load his weapon in the space of eleven seconds, enabling him to keep up a rate of fire (counting the time it took to aim the musket and pull the trigger) of at least four rounds per minute.

  Things rarely went as smoothly on the battlefield as they did on the parade grounds of Potsdam, but still the Prussian infantry excelled both at speed of fire and at skill in maneuvering. No European army could approach the precision with which Frederick’s infantry moved on the battlefield. One British observer noted, with gape-mouthed admiration, that while Prussian troops appeared slow and methodical to the untrained eye, “yet they are so accurate that no time being lost in dressing or correcting distances, they arrive sooner at their object than any others, and at the instant of forming they are in perfect order to make the attack.” The remarkable discipline of his infantry made it possible for Frederick to pull off amazing tactical feats. At the battle of Leuthen (December 5, 1757), the king’s army of thirty-five thousand men managed to outmaneuver, outflank, and ultimately crush a well-fortified Austrian army three times its size.16

  FRIEDRICH VON STEUBEN’S CAREER PATH after Prague was anything but conventional. After his convalescence, he volunteered for a post as a staff officer in one of the king’s new light infantry units, the so-called “Free Battalions” (Freibataillone). The Free Battalions were not used as line infantry, but rather for scouting, reconnaissance, and raiding. Ill-disciplined and prone to riotous behavior, they were notoriously difficult to command; the men of one of the Free Battalions murdered their commanding officer in 1761 and then the battalion defected en masse to the enemy. By serving as adjutant of Free Battalion No. 2 (under General Johann von Mayr), Steuben risked both his reputation and his life. But he did well. A fellow officer in the unit later saluted him as “an able and pleasant officer.”17

  It was in the Free Battalion that Steuben experienced his second major battle. While holding off the Austrian and Russian armies to the east with a small screening force, Frederick’s main army—only around twenty-two thousand strong—lunged west, making a forced march of almost two hundred miles in less than two weeks, to confront an allied force of French troops and Imperial levies (the Reich- sarmee). The French had a numerical advantage of almost two to one, but Frederick’s generalship made up the difference. At the village of Rossbach, on November 5, 1757, Frederick’s cavalry hit the French cavalry hard, driving them from the field, while the Prussian infantry deployed quickly into line of battle and hurled themselves at the Franco-Imperial infantry while the latter were still in marching columns. The French and Imperial troops, caught in a vicious crossfire, panicked and fled in confusion, while Frederick’s rear guard—including the Mayr Free Battalion—mopped up the shattered survivors. It was one of Frederick’s tactical masterpieces, and the casualties told the story: the Prussians suffered fewer than five hundred casualties altogether, while the Franco-Imperial army lost five thousand killed or wounded and nearly as many taken prisoner.
r />   Steuben remained with Mayr’s Free Battalion until sometime in 1759, and from there his star rose rapidly. General J. D. von Hülsen, commanding a brigade in the army of Frederick’s brother, Prince Henry, selected the now-veteran lieutenant to serve on his staff as a Brigade-Offizier, a sure sign that Steuben had by now attracted the attention of senior commanders. The staff appointment was a flattering mark of recognition, but it did not remove him from danger. Far from it. Two more battles faced him—in fact, two of the worst bloodbaths in the glorious history of the Prussian army: Kay, on July 23, 1759, and Kunersdorf, on August 12, 1759. In both cases, the Prussians, severely weakened by heavy losses from fighting three major armies simultaneously during three years of constant campaigning, were mauled by combined Austro-Russian armies. The action at Kunersdorf very nearly resulted in the complete destruction of the main Prussian army, the capture of King Frederick, and the loss of Berlin. Here Steuben received yet another wound, as did both his king and his general, Hülsen. At least he was rewarded for his pains with a promotion to the rank of first lieutenant in November 1759.

  At Hülsen’s side, Lieutenant von Steuben fought in at least two more desperate battles against the Austrians (Liegnitz, on August 15, 1760, and Torgau, November 3, 1760), but by then his administrative abilities, physical courage, and good nature had brought him to the attention of Prince Henry, who was always on the lookout for new talent—especially, it was rumored, if that talent came in the form of a handsome young officer. Whatever the nature of their relationship, it paid immediate dividends for Steuben. In May 1761, the lieutenant was officially transferred from the muster rolls of the Lestwitz Regiment to what was called the “Royal Suite,” the king’s personal headquarters, and given temporary duty as a Quartiermeister-Lieutenant. In this capacity, he would assist King Frederick and his staff with intelligence and strategic planning. It was a dream job for a thirty-year-old company officer.