Hessians: The Best Armies Money Could Buy

Again this was frequently ascribed to nurture, with young men hearing from fathers and uncles tales of adventure in far places while omitting the negatives. Moral factors were involved as well. The Hessian countryside was still strongly Calvinist in practice. Children were inculcated at an early age with fundamental concepts of duty and calling. Enhanced by secular indoctrination of loyalty to the ruler, concretized by rigid discipline in field and garrison, they produced soldiers worthy of their hire.

That is the master story; there were several subtexts. Conscription itself was a two-tiered process, with field regiments taking the most expendable recruits: the landless, the jobless, the feckless, supplemented by a steady trickle of foreigners. The “less expendables” were assigned to garrison regiments that were essentially militia formations, brought together annually in early summer for anywhere from three to six weeks of training and otherwise remaining part of the civil population and its economy. In field regiments as well, at minimum about a third of each company was on leave at any one time—working as craftsmen or laborers, assisting on family farms. That number could reach as high as 50 percent over 10 or 11 months, depending on the regiment and the circumstances.

A Hessian soldier, then, was hardly isolated from Hessian society. Conscripts and militiamen could volunteer for the field regiments, and the state encouraged that in concrete ways. An active soldier’s pay was higher than that of a domestic servant or farm laborer—enough, properly husbanded, to buy a cow or two pigs a month. That gave a man influence in his parental household. Once mastered, moreover, the routines of drill and service were significantly less demanding than those of a menial job in a subsistence economy. Discipline might be harsh in principle, but its weight fell primarily on the 10 percent that cause 90 percent of the problems in any military unit: the sullen, the stubborn, the stupid. Small wonder, then, that Hessian field regiments had little trouble keeping their ranks filled—or that many of the regulars saw even the voyage to America to help suppress a popular revolution as an adventure and an opportunity.

When mobilized, the Hessian army was an infantry force: around two dozen regiments of foot, field and garrison, supported by a few squadrons of cavalry and two or three artillery companies whose pieces were distributed as “regimental guns.” Each infantry regiment had a grenadier company, composed of picked men and usually assigned to a separate grenadier battalion on active service. For the American expedition, the army added something new: a field Jaeger (hunter) corps of two companies. Foresters, hunters and the occasional poacher from all over Germany volunteered, attracted by high bounties and high pay, bringing their own rifles. Performing many of the duties of contemporary rangers, the Jaeger were widely considered the elite of the British army in North America.

An officer’s career in Hesse-Kassel was both honorable and a good way to share in the subsidy system benefits. The officer corps was characterized by long service—an average of 28 years for captains and majors of one regiment in 1776. It was primarily native—about half noble and the other half either bourgeois who began as “free corporals,” with the understanding that a commission was in the offing, or commoners promoted from the ranks. In contrast to most German states, Prussia in particular, an officer’s official status and precedence were based on his military rank and not his social origins. Senior appointments were, nevertheless, largely filled by aristocrats through the end of the period.

Elector Karl recognized the risk of professional stagnation in a small army. By 1771, 61 officers and cadets were studying academic subjects at the Collegium Carolinum, Hesse-Kassel’s foremost university. By the time of the French Revolutionary Wars, Hessian officers were among the leaders in developing new tactical doctrines. An officer who joined in 1777 described the change: “In my early youth, who could last longest at a drinking bout, who showed the most dueling cuts was held to be a fine fellow, and whoever had cheated a Jew was considered a genius. This fashion has completely changed.” A bit optimistic perhaps, but indicating an internal dynamic that produced solid leadership at regimental levels for an army designed to fight under alien high command.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to