Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (38 page)

Ernst von Barsewisch, the son of a modest Junker landowner in the Altmark, had been educated at the Berlin Cadet School and later served as a Prussian officer in many of the battles of the Seven Years War. His memoirs, based on diary entries sketched while on campaign, capture the mixture of samurai fatalism and schoolboy camaraderie that could sometimes be observed among officers in action. At the battle of Hochkirch, Barsewisch happened to be positioned near the king on a section of the Prussian wing that came under Austrian attack. There was a thick hail of musket balls, most of which were aimed at the chests and faces of the standing men. Just next to the king, a Major von Haugwitz was shot through the arm and shortly afterwards another ball buried itself in the neck of the king’s horse. Not far from where Barsewisch was standing, Field Marshal von Keith (a favourite of the king’s) was torn
from his horse by a shell and died on the spot. The next commander to fall was Prince William of Brunswick, brigadier of Barsewisch’s regiment, who was drilled through by a musket ball and fell dead to the ground. His terrified horse, an immaculate white stallion, galloped riderless back and forth between the lines for nearly half an hour. To help master their nerves, Barsewisch and the young noblemen around him engaged in light-hearted banter:

Early in the action I had had the honour that a musket ball had drilled through the peak of my hat at the front just above my head; not long afterwards, a second ball shot through the large upturned rim on the left side of the hat, so that it fell from my head. I said to the von Hertzbergs, who were standing not far from me: ‘Gentlemen, should I put this hat back on my head, if the Imperials want it so badly?’‘Yes, do,’ they said –‘the hat does you honour.’ The eldest von Hertzberg took his snuff box in his hand and said: ‘Gentlemen, take a pinch of courage!’ I stepped up to him, took a pinch and said: ‘Yes, courage is what we need.’ Von Unruh followed me and the brother of von Hertzberg, the youngest, took the last pinch. Just as the eldest von Hertzberg had taken his pinch of snuff from the box and was raising it to his nose, a musket ball came and flew straight into the top of his forehead. I was standing right beside him, I looked at him – he cried out ‘Lord Jesus’ – turned around and fell dead to the ground.
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It was through this collective sacrifice of its young men – note the presence of three von Hertzberg brothers on one section of the Prussian line! – that the Junker nobility earned its special place within the Frederician state.

The great majority of first-person battle narratives stem from officers, mostly of noble birth, but this should not be allowed to overshadow the phenomenal sacrifice of humbler men in the field. For every officer killed at the battle of Lobositz, more than eighty private soldiers were slain. In a letter to his family, the cavalryman Nikolaus Binn from Erxleben near Osterburg in the Altmark reported twelve deaths among the men from his home district, including an Andreas Garlip and a Nicolaus Garlip who must have been brothers or cousins, and added reassuringly: ‘all those who are not named as dead are in good health.’
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On 6 October, five days after the battle, Franz Reiss, a soldier of the Hülsen Regiment, described his arrival at the battlefield. As soon as he and his fellows had formed up in line, he wrote, they had come under heavy Austrian cannon fire:

So the battle began at six o’clock in the morning and dragged on amidst thundering and firing until four in the afternoon, and all the while I stood in such danger that I cannot thank God enough for [preserving] my health. In the very first cannon shots our Krumpholtz took a cannon ball through his head and the half of it was blown away, he was standing just beside me, and the brains and skull of Krumpholtz sprayed into my face and the gun was blown to pieces from my shoulder, but I, praise God, was uninjured. Now, dear wife, I cannot possibly describe what happened, for the shooting on both sides was so great, that no-one could hear a word of what anyone was saying, and we didn’t see and hear just a thousand bullets, but many thousands. But as we got into the afternoon, the enemy took flight and God gave us the victory. And as we came forward into the field, we saw men lying, not just one, but 3 or 4 lying on top of each other, some dead with their heads gone, others short of both legs, or their arms missing, in short, it was an amazing sight. Now, dear child, just think how we must have felt, we who had been led meekly to the slaughterhouse without the faintest inkling of what was to come.
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In the aftermath of an action the battlefield descended into chaos. To remain wounded on the field could be a miserable fate. In the nights that followed the battles of Zorndorf and Kunersdorf, the battlefield echoed with the shrieks of the Prussian wounded being killed by Cossack light troops of the Russian army. Even if they escaped deliberate brutality, wounded soldiers needed determination and good luck to survive. The Prussian army had a relatively large and well-organized surgical support service by the standards of the day, but in the disorder following an action (especially a lost one), the chances of finding one’s way in time to proper care might be very slim. The quality of treatment varied enormously from surgeon to surgeon and the facilities for handling infected wounds were very rudimentary.

After Leuthen, where a musket ball bored through his neck and lodged itself between his shoulder blades, Ernst von Barsewisch had the good fortune to run into a captured Austrian soldier who happened to be a Belgian graduate of the surgical school at the University of Lyon. Sadly, the Belgian no longer had his fine surgical tools to work with – his Prussian captor had snatched them as booty. Using the ‘very bad and blunt knife’ of a shoemaker, however, he was able to hack the ball out of Barsewisch’s back with ‘ten or twelve cuts’. Less fortunate was Barsewisch’s comrade Baron Gans Edler von Puttlitz, whose foot had
been shattered by canister shot and had grown infected while he lay out in the cold untended for two nights and a day. The captured surgeon told him that an amputation of the leg below the knee was his only hope, but Puttlitz was too confused or too terrified to consent. The infection gradually spread and he died a few days later. Shortly before he died, he told Barsewisch that he was his parents’ only child and begged him to be sure that they were informed of the place of his burial. ‘This death affected me greatly,’ wrote Barsewisch, ‘because this was a young person of about seventeen years, and from his wound he had watched his death draw nearer, creeping slowly, hour by hour.’
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The Seven Years War, unlike the Thirty Years War of the previous century, was a ‘cabinet war’ fought by relatively disciplined bodies of troops equipped and supplied by their own governments through relatively sophisticated logistical organizations. It was thus not marked by the kind of pervasive anarchy and violence that had traumatized the populations of the German territories in the 1630s and 1640s. But this did not mean that the civilians in occupied areas or theatres of combat were not subject to arbitrary exactions, reprisals and even atrocities. Following their invasion of Pomerania, for example, the Swedes demanded from the neighbouring Uckermark in northern Brandenburg contributions totalling 200,000 thalers, double the amount of contribution raised annually by the king from that province.
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The Hohenzollern provinces of Westphalia were under French and Austrian occupation for much of the war; here the military authorities imposed an intricate system of contributions and extortions, often supported by the kidnapping of local notables as hostages.
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French soldiers from the defeat at Rossbach committed numerous excesses as they passed through Thuringia and Hessen. ‘If one wished to relate all of these disorders, one would never get to the end of it,’ one French general reported. ‘Over a forty-league compass, the ground was swarming with our soldiers: they pillaged, killed, raped, sacked, and committed every possible horror…’
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Particularly problematic were the ‘light troops’ used by most armies at this time. These units were recruited on a voluntary basis, operated semi-autonomously from the regular army, were not provided with the standard logistical support, and were expected to support themselves entirely through exactions and the acquisition of booty. The best-known examples of such troops were the Russian Cossacks and the exotically
clothed Austrian ‘Panduren’, but the French too retained the services of such units. During the first phase of the Russian occupation of East Prussia, some 12,000 light troops made up of Cossacks and Kalmucks rampaged through the country with fire and sword: in the words of one contemporary, they ‘murdered or mangled unarmed and defenceless people, they hanged them from trees or cut off their noses or ears; others were hacked in pieces in the most cruel and disgusting manner…’
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During 1761, the Fischer Free Corps, a light unit in French service, broke into East Frisia – a small territory in the north-west of Germany that had fallen to Prussia in 1744 – and terrorized the civilian population with a week of rape, murder and other atrocities. The peasants, drawing on a local tradition of collective protest and resistance, responded with an uprising that reminded some contemporaries of the Peasants’ War of 1525. Only through the deployment of French regular army units stationed nearby could peace be restored in the area.
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Conflict at this level of intensity was the exception, not the rule, but in all provinces touched by the war, there were substantially raised mortalities, mainly through the so-called ‘camp epidemics’ that spread from overcrowded troop hospitals. In Kleve and Mark, the mortality for the war years amounted to 15 per cent of the population. In the city of Emmerich, situated on the bank of the Rhine in Kleve, 10 per cent of the townsfolk died during 1758 alone, mainly of diseases contracted from French soldiers fleeing out of north-west Germany. The demographic losses for nearly all of the Prussian lands were breathtaking: 45,000 in Silesia, 70,000 in Pomerania, 114,000 in the Neumark and the Kurmark combined, 90,000 in East Prussia. In all it seems that the war took the lives of about 400,000 Prussians, amounting to roughly 10 per cent of the population.

The diplomatic reorientation of 1756, in which the Austrians and the French overcame their ancestral antipathies to form a coalition, was so out of tune with the traditional pattern of inter-dynastic partnerships that it came to be known as the ‘diplomatic revolution’.
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And yet, as we have seen, the events of that year were in large part the working out of a process of change that had been set in train in December 1740.
The Prussian invasion of Silesia was the real revolution. Without this powerful stimulus, the Austrians would not have abandoned their British allies to embrace their French enemies. From here unfolded a sequence of shocks and realignments that runs like a long fuse through the history of modern Europe.

In France, the alliance with Austria, and especially the abject defeat at Rossbach, played disastrously with the home public, raising doubts about the competence of the Bourbon regime that would persevere until the revolutionary crisis of the 1780s. ‘More than ever before,’ the French Foreign Minister Cardinal de Bernis observed in the spring of 1758, ‘our nation is outraged against the war. Our enemy, the king of Prussia, is loved to the point of distraction… but the court of Vienna is hated because it is seen as the bloodsucker of the state.’
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In the eyes of critical French contemporaries, the treaties with Austria of 1756 and 1757 were ‘the disgrace of Louis XV’, ‘monstrous in principle and disastrous for France in practice’. The defeats of this war, the Comte de Ségur recalled, ‘both wounded and aroused French national pride. From one end of the kingdom to the other, to oppose the Court became a point of honour.’ The first partition of Poland in 1772, in which Prussia, Austria and Russia joined in despoiling one of France’s traditional clients, deepened such apprehensions by demonstrating that the new alliance system operated to the benefit of Austria and the detriment of France.
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To make matters worse, the French monarchy chose to cement the Austrian alliance by marrying the future Louis XVI to the Habsburg princess Marie Antoinette in 1771. She later came to personify the political malaise of Bourbon absolutism in its terminal phase.
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In short, we can follow at least one strand of the crisis that culminated in the fall of the French monarchy back to the consequences of Frederick’s invasion of Silesia.

For Russia, too, the end of the Seven Years War inaugurated a new era. Russia did not achieve the territorial objective Elisabeth had set herself, but it emerged from the conflict with its reputation substantially enhanced. This was the first time Russia had played a sustained role in a major European conflict. Its place among the European great powers was confirmed in 1772, when Russia joined Austria and Prussia in the synchronized annexation of territories on the periphery of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and again in 1779, when Russia acted as guarantor of the Treaty of Teschen, signed between Prussia and Austria. The long journey towards full membership of the European concert of
powers that had begun with the reign of Peter the Great was now complete.
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Russia’s combination of expansionism, power and invulnerability eclipsed the threat once posed by the Swedes and the Turks. Russia would henceforth play a crucial role in the power struggle within German Europe – in 1812–13,1848–50,1866, 1870–71,1914–17,1939–45,1945–89 and 1990, Russian interventions determined or helped to determine power-political outcomes in Germany. From this moment onwards, the history of Prussia and the history of Russia would remain intertwined. Frederick was no clairvoyant, but he could sense Russia’s arrival and was intuitively aware of its irreversibility. After the slaughter at Zorndorf and Kunersdorf, he could never contemplate the spectacle of Russian power without a frisson of dread. The Empire of Catherine II, he told his brother Prince Henry in 1769, was ‘a terrible power, which will make all Europe tremble’.
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