Frederick The Great: The First Modern Military Celebrity

By Dennis Showalter | Military History  | 2 comments  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

While almost certainly apocryphal, the exchange is portentous. The army had suffered heavy and irreplaceable casualties at Lobositz, Kolin and in front of Prague. Russian troops invaded East Prussia that summer, while a mass of French troops reinforced with contingents from the Holy Roman Empire advanced against Frederick from the west. The king’s unprovoked attack on Saxony and subsequent plundering of that state had deprived him of whatever sympathy he might have garnered elsewhere in Germany. Prussia’s prospects were grim.

The victory at Rossbach on November 5, 1757, furthered Frederick’s transformation. The phrase allegedly uttered by a French officer to his Prussian captor, “Sir, you are an army—we are a traveling whorehouse,” reflected a baggage train that actually did include “valets, servants, cooks, hairdressers, courtesans, priests and actors…dressing gowns, hairnets, sunshades, nightgowns and parrots.” Propagandists seized on that fact to trumpet the purported Prussian virtues of simplicity and chastity, and Frederick became legend, unwittingly lending his name to taverns, streets and towns as far off as Pennsylvania.

As Frederick had learned, however, warfare can be random. The Prussian surrender at Breslau on November 25, 1757, marked the nadir of an ill-conducted local campaign that left Berlin vulnerable, and when the king arrived in Silesia on December 2, he was left with one option: fight…and win. His behavior over the coming days would lay the foundations for the myth of Old Fritz. Contemporary accounts describe a man overcoming sickness and exhaustion, moving from bivouac to bivouac, warming himself at the men’s fires, listening to stories and hearing complaints, and promising reward for loyal service. The king capped his performance on December 3, when he invited not only his generals but also the army’s regiment and battalion commanders to his headquarters.

Frederick appeared before his officers not as a commander radiating confidence and vitality, but as a tired, aging man in a threadbare and snuff-stained uniform. The army, he declared in a barely audible voice, would attack. Its only alternatives were victory or death. “We are fighting for our glory, for our honor and for our wives and children….Those who stand with me can rest assured I will look after their families if they are killed. Anyone wishing to retire can go now, but will have no further claim on my benevolence.” Lest anyone think he had gone soft, Frederick finished by vowing that any cavalry regiment failing in its duty would lose its horses and any infantry battalion that flinched faced confiscation of its colors, the ceremonial braid from its uniforms and even its swords.

The Parchwitz speech, named for the campsite, was a subtle blend of sincerity and artifice that lost nothing in the retelling. Years afterward men could remember everything they saw and heard—regardless of whether they were actually present. Two days later, on December 5, 1757, the Prussian army outmaneuvered, then smashed, the Austrians at Leuthen.

After Leuthen there were no more easy victories, no more brilliant maneuvers—just the close-quarters massacres at Zorndorf (1758) and Kunersdorf in Silesia (1759), at Hochkirch (1758) and finally at Torgau (1760). None suggested a warrior king who led by force of will and intelligence. Yet his army endured part of the winter of 1759–60 in tents pitched on the Silesian plateau. While short on rations and racked by dysentery and respiratory diseases, it neither exploded in mutiny nor dissolved in desertion. The following summer, many of the same men took part in a month’s worth of forced marches that saw many stragglers but few deserters.

These were no longer the seasoned soldiers who had filled Prussia’s ranks in 1756. By the spring of 1761, three-fifths of the army’s replacements still came from the regimental depots, but many were foreigners—prisoners of war pressured into taking new colors, brought in by recruiting parties that differed little from press gangs, the flotsam of five years’ hard war. About half of the prewar officer corps was gone, and some of their replacements were as young as 13. Yet this unpromising amalgam continued to stand its ground against steadily improving enemies. When Russia’s Empress Elizabeth died unexpectedly in 1763, Frederick was able to exit from the Seven Years War, his kingdom and reputation intact.

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Tags: 17th - 18th Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Social History