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The Military Experience in the Age of Reason

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The Military Experience in the Age of Reason The Military Experience in the Age of Reason By the same author Russia’s Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power, 1700–1800 Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660 The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great, 1160–1789 (Siege Warfare volume 2) Frederick the Great: A Military Life Christopher Duffy The Military Experience in the Age of Reason Routledge & Kegan Paul London and New York First published in 1987 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Published in the USA by Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc. in association with Methuen Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © Christopher Duffy 1987 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data British Library CIP Data also available ISBN 0-203-97685-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-7102-1024-8 (Print Edition) Contents Preface vi 1 Part 1 The armies of the Enlightenment 1 Military Europe 3 2 The officer class 26 3 The private soldier 66 101 4 Generals and armies Part II War 110 5 The campaign 112 6 The battle 140 7 On the wilder fringes 198 8 The march of the siege 214 219 Part III The military experience in context and perspective 9 Land war and the experience of civilian society 221 10 The death of a memory 230 11 Summary and conclusions 233 Appendix Principal wars and campaigns 237 Bibliography 245 Index 255 Preface Anybody who has a serious interest in history must have asked himself whether his experiences in his own time offer him a direct insight into the life which people led in the past. Is it, in fact, really true that the distance is so great that ‘the past is another country’? The present book applies this question to the military world of the eighteenth century. Although it is a period which has long exercised a fascination for me, I have become increasingly conscious of some formidable obstacles in the way of our understanding of what went on in the powdered and bewigged heads of those old-time soldiers. I believe that we must look for something more penetrating and analytical than yet another study of kings and battles, a compendium of eyewitness accounts, or a book with a title like Daily Life in George Washington’s Army. Nothing could be more tedious than to impose a mechanical formula on historical writing, but I have borne three considerations constantly in mind throughout the study: first, what was it about the eighteenth-century military profession that was peculiar to individual nations? Second, what was common to the military experience in all times? Third, what, by process of elimination, was characteristic of eighteenth-century armies in general? The source material must be approached with great caution. Often, when we think we are moving over firm ground, it sinks beneath our feet. When countries like Prussia and Russia resorted to conscription, it was not to summon up the resources of the nation, as in the Napoleonic period, but to limit and control the demands which the army made on the useful and hardworking civilian population. Again in 1759 Dr Carl Friedrich Pauli sent forth what sounds at first hearing like a nationalistic clarion call, demanding recognition for genuine German military heroes. His understanding of ‘German’ must represent something very different from ours, for we note that his pantheon contains Maximilian Ulysses Browne, who hailed from County Limerick, and Octavio Piccolomini, the son of a line of Sienese condottieri. When, finally, we take the books or documents in our hands, we have to bear in mind that we are dealing with the testimony of survivors, and survivors who for the most part presented experiences in a way that was acceptable to themselves and posterity. Ulrich Bräker is one of the few soldiers who writes frankly about having deserted, just as Garrett Watts of the North Carolina Militia appears to be the one individual who owns up to having fled in action, and yet we know in a general way that desertion and flight were at least as common in the eighteenth century as in other periods of history. Such contamination of the sources does not necessarily originate in anything as simple as lying. On this point the German general Verdy du Vernois wrote about his campaign in 1866 thirty years after the event: One must not forget that in the course of the years we tend to confuse the explanations and accounts we receive from other parties with the recollection of our own impressions at the time. We come to believe that we have thought, or even experienced such and such a thing, when it actually became lodged in our minds by some other means, and perhaps in a totally misleading way. Another characteristic failing of the tribe of military historians is that we are inclined to jump from one ‘famous name’ to another, and parade extracts from the writings of great men without due regard for the context. The Rêveries of Maurice de Saxe were dashed off in the course of thirteen sleepless nights in 1732, in other words long before the marshal’s fulminating campaigns in the Netherlands in the 1740s, and they no more represent a considered military testament than do the Principes Généraux (1748) of Frederick the Great, which were composed well before the Seven Years War. We can retrieve the military thought of Saxe, Frederick and the rest only by the laborious business of retracing their campaigns (a deeply unfashionable exercise among practitioners of the New Military History), and by reading correspondence and other forms of evidence that were totally unknown to most of their contemporaries. French authors are plentiful, but when they are not dogmatic or geometrical in tone they tend toward the self-centred and the bombastic. Russian accounts are the most vivid, and they speak the most directly from the heart without respect to conventions. The Prussian writers are the most reflective, and their ranks embrace individuals like the hussar officer Lojewsky, to whom we owe unique insights into mounted combat, or the Feldprediger Carl Daniel Küster, who posed the kind of questions which military psychologists like to ask today. The Spaniards as a whole have the least to say, but they are redeemed by the singularly informative tomes of the Marqués de Santa Cruz. We accompany our warriors on some sea voyages (see pp. 157–9), but we otherwise stay rooted on terra firma. Much information on naval life in this period will be found in Rodger, N.A. (1986), The Wooden World. An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, London. I owe a great deal to years of association with Paddy Griffith, Richard Holmes and John Keegan, who have striven to show that the details of the military experience are worth taking seriously, and whose work commands respect well beyond the shores of the United Kingdom. Dr Jeremy Black has kindly supplied me with manuscript material relating to the period of the War of the Polish Succession. My final salute is to the officers and men of the eighteenth century, who have proved to be such entertaining companions, and have given us, on balance, much more to like and esteem than to condemn. Part I The armies of the Enlightenment 1 Military Europe The character and importance of the eighteenth century The time has long passed since it was fashionable to dismiss the eighteenth century as a decorative interval, suspended between the glooms and dooms of the Wars of Religion and the grinding industrialisation of the nineteenth century. Just as the works of Haydn and Mozart now make up part of ‘our’ music, so their contemporaries among the statesmen and soldiers addressed themselves to questions of major historical import. It still matters today that Russia secured the domination of eastern Europe, that Prussia became the most vital power in Germany, and that the Americans wrested control of their future from British hands. Perhaps we should not attempt to define too closely what is meant by the eighteenth century, other than the span of years extending from 1701 to 1800. Three, four or five generations were alive during this time. Few of the people who made them up were conscious of living through a particular period of history, and many of them never escaped from a physical and mental environment which had changed little since the Middle Ages. If, however, we define a period in terms of public affairs, fashion and the other concerns of the literate minority, then the eighteenth century has a number of recognisable characteristics, and most of them have to do with the age’s feeling for style and restraint. The eighteenth century seemed to be incapable of creating anything which looked or sounded ugly—to the extent that the graffiti of the tourists were carved with the utmost elegance. No less impressively, men of the eighteenth century, although much given to fighting wars, conducted them with much less of the inhumanity which has stained the records of the ages. The middle of the century, and more specifically the years between 1748 and 1763, was a peculiarly vital and innovatory time, and may be seen as the epitome of the so- called ‘Age of Reason’, which is generally taken to be the period between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
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