Frederick, by making his armies less dependent on magazines, acquired a freer, bolder, and more rapid style. The allies aimed to parcel out Prussia. Frederick met them with decision. Surrounded on all sides by overwhelming numbers, he was compelled to defend himself by hard knocks. And his individual equipment as well as the discipline of his army enabled him to do this with unequalled brilliancy. In all history there is no such series of tactical feats as Frederick’s.
Each captain must be weighed by the conditions under which he worked. We cannot try Alexander by the standard of Napoleon. While Napoleon’s battle tactics have something stupendous in their magnificence, Frederick’s battles, in view of numbers and difficulties, are distinctly finer. Frederick’s decisiveness aroused fresh interest in battle. Manœuvres now sought battle as an object, while sieges became fewer and of small moment.
All Europe was agog at Frederick’s successes, but no one understood them. Lloyd alone saw below the surface. As Gustavus had been misinterpreted, so now Frederick. Some imitated his minutiæ down to the pig-tails of his grenadiers. Some saw the cure-all of war in operations against the enemy’s flanks and rear. Some saw in detachments, some in concentration, the trick of the king. Only Lloyd recognized that it all lay in the magnificent personality of the king himself, that there was no secret, no set rule, no legerdemain, but that here again was one of the world’s great captains. The imitators of Frederick caught but the letter. The spirit they could not catch. Until two generations more had passed, and Lloyd and Jomini had put in printed form what Frederick and Napoleon did, the world could not guess the riddle.
His own fortresses were of importance to Frederick because his enemy respected them. But he paid small heed to the enemy’s. He could strike him so much harder by battle, that he never frittered away his time on sieges, except as a means to an end. The allies clung to their fortified positions. Frederick despised them, and showed the world that his gallant Prussians could take them by assault.
This period, then, is distinguished for the revival of battles, and of operations looking towards battle. Of these Frederick was the author. Battles in the Seven Years’ War were not haphazard. Each had its purpose. Pursuit had, however, not yet been made effective so to glean the utmost from victory. No single battle in this period had remarkable results. Frederick’s battles were generally fought to prevent some particular enemy from penetrating too far into the dominions of Prussia. In this they were uniformly successful. But in the sense of Napoleon’s battles they were not decisive. The superior decisiveness of Napoleon’s lay in the strategic conditions and in his superiority of forces. No battles—as battles—could be more thoroughly fought out than Frederick’s; no victories more brilliant.
Frederick not only showed Europe what speed and decision can do in war, but he made many minor improvements in drill, discipline, and battle-tactics. He introduced horse-artillery. His giving scope to such men as Seydlitz and Ziethen made the Prussian cavalry a model for all time. He demonstrated that armies can march and operate continuously, with little rest, and without regard to seasons. Light troops grew in efficiency. War put on an aspect of energetic purpose, but without the ruthless barbarity of the Thirty Years’ War.
No doubt Napoleon, at his best, was the greater soldier. But Napoleon had Frederick’s example before him, as well as the lessons of all other great captains by heart. Napoleon’s motive was aggressive; Frederick’s, pure defence. Hence partly the larger method. But Frederick in trial or disaster was unspeakably greater than Napoleon, both as soldier and man.
In the forty-six years of his reign Frederick added sixty per cent. to the Prussian dominion, doubled its population, put seventy million thalers in its treasury, and created two hundred thousand of the best troops in existence. Prussia had been a small state, which the powers of Europe united to parcel out. He left it a great state, which all Europe respected, and planted in it the seed which has raised its kings to be emperors of Germany. This result is in marked contrast to what Napoleon’s wars did for France.
Whoever, under the sumptuous dome of the Invalides, has gazed down upon the splendid sarcophagus of Napoleon, and has stepped within the dim and narrow vault of the plain old garrison church at Potsdam, where stand the simple metal coffins of Frederick the Great and of his father, must have felt that in the latter shrine, rather than the other, he has stood in the presence of the ashes of a king.
Whatever may be said of Frederick’s personal method of government, or of the true Hohenzollern theory that Prussia belonged to him as an heritage to make or to mar as he saw fit, it cannot be denied that he was true to the spirit of his own verses, penned in the days of his direst distress:—