Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (62 page)

In order to facilitate this freedom of movement, Jahn developed a special costume, whose loose jacket and wide-legged trousers of grey unbleached linen were designed to accommodate and encourage the free forms of bodily movement so prized by the gymnasts. Here again, there was an antimilitary dimension: ‘The light and austere, unpretentious and thoroughly functional linen costume of the gymnast,’ Jahn wrote, ‘is unsuited to [… ] braids, aiguillettes, armbands, dress swords and gauntlets on the leaders of processions etc. The earnest spirit of the fighter (
Wehrmannsernst
) is thereby transformed into idle play.’
¹⁸
Coupled with this hostility to the hierarchical order of the traditional military was an implicit egalitarianism. Jahn’s followers were encouraged to address each other as ‘
du
’, and their distinctive costume helped to dissolve barriers of status by removing the outward signs of social difference.
¹⁹
The gymnasts were even known to sing songs proclaiming that all members were ‘equal in estate and rank’ (‘
An Rang und Stand sind alle gleich
’).
²⁰
Jahn’s outdoor displays, in which young men swung, twirled and twisted on raised bars that were the prototypes of today’s gymnastic equipment, attracted huge crowds. Here was a clear demonstration of how patriotism could provide the key to a reconceptualization of political culture as rooted in voluntary allegiances rather than hierarchical structures of authority.

It was precisely the subversive potential in patriotic discourses that alienated the monarch from the more radical prescriptions of the military reformers. On 28 December 1809, Frederick William at last returned to Berlin, where crowds cheered him through the city. But he remained opposed to patriotic experiments of any kind. Now that he was reestablished in the capital, he was more completely under the eye of the French authorities than ever – indeed Napoleon had demanded that he leave Königsberg for this very reason. Moreover, after 1809, the position
of the French seemed totally impregnable. By 1810, nearly all the German territories left over from the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire had joined the Confederation of the Rhine, an association of states whose members were obliged to contribute military contingents in support of Napoleon’s foreign policy. In the face of such might, resistance seemed hopeless.

Frederick William’s reluctance to risk precipitate military action was further reinforced by personal tragedy. On 19 July 1810, the unexpected death of his wife Luise, at the age of only thirty-four, plunged him into a long depression in which his only comforts were seclusion and prayer. He had no faith in the idea of insurrectionary warfare; the reformers were allowed to proceed with various improvements to military administration and training but Frederick William blocked their efforts to mobilize a ‘people’s army’ (
Volksarmee
) through the introduction of universal conscription. To Gneisenau’s proposal that clergymen be employed to urge the people to rise up against their conquerors the king appended the laconic marginal note: ‘One executed preacher and the whole thing will be over with.’ On Gneisenau’s proposals for a system of citizen militias he commented simply: ‘Good – as poetry.’
²¹
Nevertheless, the king agreed one important concession to the war party. During the summer of 1811, he approved plans for the enlargement of the Prussian army and the reinforcement of key strongholds. There were also tactful feelers in the direction of Russia and England.

Fortunately for Frederick William, most of his senior advisers (including Hardenberg) supported his policy of wait-and-see. The king thus had little difficulty in resisting the entreaties of the ‘war party’. But with the cooling of relations between France and Russia from 1810 onwards, the external pressures on the Berlin decision-makers gradually increased. It had always been difficult to imagine a European future in which Napoleon and Alexander I could get along as brothers. Tensions had been accumulating between the two for some time, but the breach came in December 1810, when Napoleon annexed the north-west German Duchy of Oldenburg, whose integrity had been guaranteed in the Peace of Tilsit and whose sovereign was Tsar Alexander’s uncle. Alexander responded with the
ukaz
of 31 December, by which he closed Russian markets and ports to French products (except wines and silks). During the spring and summer of 1811 the two powers drifted apart, neither committing itself to war. By the winter of 1811–12, however, it was
clear that a major French offensive was imminent. Napoleon reinforced his armies in eastern and central Germany, occupied Swedish Pomerania and transferred thirty-six battalions from Spain.
²²

Once again, the Prussians found themselves in danger of being ground under the wheels of great-power politics. Frederick William and his advisers – Hardenberg foremost among them – displayed the usual timidity and caution. The rearmament process that had been launched in the early summer was impossible to hide from the French. In August 1811, Napoleon demanded an explanation. Dissatisfied with Hardenberg’s answer, he issued an ultimatum warning that if rearmament activity did not cease forthwith, the French ambassador would be withdrawn from Berlin and replaced by Marshal Davout at the head of his army. This announcement was greeted with consternation in Berlin. Gneisenau objected that to comply with such outright bullying would be political suicide, but Frederick William overruled him and orders went out that the recruitment drive and fortification works were to be stopped. There were also loud protests from the commanding officer of the Kolberg fortress, General Blücher, who would later play a key role in the campaigns against France. When Blücher urged that the king resist the French orders and remove himself from Berlin, he was recalled from his command and replaced by Tauentzien, a general acceptable to Napoleon.

The final humiliation came in the form of the offensive alliance treaty imposed by Napoleon on 24 February 1812. The Prussians undertook to quarter and supply the Grand Army as it tramped eastwards through Prussia on its way to invade Russia, to open all their munitions stores and fortresses to the French command and to provide Napoleon with an auxiliary corps of 12,000 men. This ‘agreement’ was extorted from Berlin in a manner that recalled the treaty negotiations of the Thirty Years War. Napoleon began by offering Krusemarck, the Prussian ambassador at the imperial headquarters, the choice of having the Grand Army enter Prussia as a friend or as a foe. In desperation, the ambassador provisionally accepted all conditions and forwarded the document to Berlin for ratification. But the French delayed the departure of the courier bearing the text, so that by the time it reached Frederick William a French army corps was already approaching the Prussian capital.

Prussia was now a mere instrument of Napoleon’s military strategy, on a par with the German satellite states of the Rhenish Confederation. For those patriotic reformers who had striven so hard to prepare Prussia
for the coming struggle with Napoleon, this was the ultimate disappointment. A group of prominent senior officials resigned from office in disgust. These included the sometime chief of police in Berlin, Justus Gruner, who made his way to Prague, where he joined a network of patriots dedicated to overthrowing the French through insurrection and sabotage (he was arrested by the Austrian government – also allied with France – in August). Scharnhorst, the driving engine behind the military reforms, went into ‘inner exile’, disappearing entirely from public life. Three of the most talented military innovators, Boyen, Gneisenau and Clausewitz, broke ranks with their colleagues and entered the service of the Tsar in the belief that only Russia now possessed the potential to break Napoleon’s power. Here they were able to reconnect with Stein, who, having spent a period in Austrian exile, joined the imperial Russian headquarters in June 1812 at the express invitation of Tsar Alexander.

From March onward, the men of the Grand Army tramped through the Neumark, Pomerania, West and East Prussia, making their way eastwards to their assembly points. By June 1812, some 300,000 men – French, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Walloons and others – were gathered in East Prussia. It soon became clear that the provincial administration was in no position to coordinate the provisioning of this vast mass of troops. The previous year’s harvest had been poor and grain supplies were quickly depleted. Hans Jakob von Auerswald, provincial president of West and East Prussia, reported in April that the farm animals in East and West Prussia were dying of hunger, the roads were strewn with dead horses, and there was no seed corn left. The provincial government’s provisioning apparatus soon broke down under the pressure, and individual commanders simply ordered their troops to carry out independent requisitioning. It was said that those who still owned draft animals ploughed and sowed at night, so as not to see their last horse or ox carted off. Others hid their horses in the forest, though the French soon got wise to this practice and began combing the woods for concealed animals. Under these conditions, discipline rapidly broke down and there were numerous reports of excesses by the troops, especially extortion, plundering and beatings. One report from a senior official spoke of devastation ‘even worse than in the Thirty Years War’. When no horses were to be had, the French commanders forced peasants into the harness. The average East Prussian farmer, Auerswald reported in August, found it impossible to understand how he could be so mistreated by the allies
of his king; indeed it was said the French behaved themselves worse as ‘friends’ in 1812 than they had as enemies in 1807. In the Lithuanian areas on the eastern margins of the province, the summer brought famine and the inevitable rise in deaths among children.
²³
In the memorable words of the Hanoverian diplomat Ludwig Ompteda, the French had left the inhabitants of Prussia with ‘nothing but eyes to weep with in their misery’.
²⁴

Throughout the Prussian lands, the mood gradually shifted from resentment to a simmering hatred of the Napoleonic forces. Vague early rumours of French setbacks in Russia were greeted with excitement and heartfelt
schadenfreude
. The first sketchy reports of the burning of Moscow (razed by the Russians to deny Napoleon winter quarters) arrived in the eastern provinces of Prussia at the beginning of October. There was particular interest in reports of the appalling damage done to the Grand Army by irregular forces of Cossacks and armed peasant partisans. On 12 November, when the newspapers reported the withdrawal of the Grand Army from Moscow, rumour gave way to near-certainty. The French diplomat Lecaro, stationed in Berlin, was shocked at the intensity of public emotion: in three and a half years of living in the city, he wrote, he had never seen its inhabitants display ‘such intense hatred and such open rage’. Emboldened by the recent news, the Prussian people ‘no longer concealed its desire to join with the Russians in exterminating everything that belongs to the French system’.
²⁵
On 14 December, the 29th Bulletin of the Grand Army put an end to any further doubts about the outcome of the Russian campaign. Issued in the Emperor’s name, the bulletin blamed the catastrophe on bad weather and the incompetence and treachery of others, announced that Napoleon had left his men in Russia and was hastening west towards Paris, and closed with a remarkably brutal expression of imperial self-centredness: ‘The Emperor’s health has never been better.’ In Prussia, this news triggered further incidents of unrest. In Neustadt, West Prussia, local inhabitants fought with Neapolitan troops guarding a transport of Russian prisoners of war. There were spontaneous attacks on French military personnel, especially in taverns, where patriotic passions were inflamed by the consumption of alcohol.

But no rumour and no printed report could bring home the meaning of Napoleon’s catastrophe as forcefully as the sight of the remnants of the once-invincible Grand Army limping westwards out of Russia.

The noblest figures had been bent and shrunken by frost and hunger, they were covered with blue bruises and white frost-sores. Whole limbs were frozen off and rotting [… ] they gave off a pestilential stench. [… ] Their clothing consisted of rags, straw mats, old women’s clothing, sheepskins, or whatever else they could lay hands on. None had proper headgear; instead they bound their heads with old cloth or pieces of shirt; instead of shoes and leggings, their feet were wrapped with straw, fur or rags.
²⁶

The slow-burning malice of the peasantry now ignited into acts of revenge as the rural population took matters into their own hands. ‘The lowest classes of the people,’ District President Theodor von Schön reported from Gumbinnen, ‘and especially the peasants, permit themselves in their fanaticism the most horrific mistreatment of these unhappy wretches [… ] in the villages and on the country roads, they vent all their rage against them [… ] All obedience to the officials has ceased.’
²⁷
There were reports of attacks on stragglers by armed troops of peasants.

During the month of December 1812, the Prussian government, like those of the other German client states, remained committed to the French alliance. On 15 December, when Napoleon requested that the Prussians expand their military contingent, the government in Berlin meekly complied. As the year drew to an end, however, Frederick William came under increasing pressure to renege on the alliance of 24 February and join in Russia’s struggle against Napoleon. Of three memoranda submitted to him by senior officials on Christmas day 1812, two (from Knesebeck and Schöler) urged him to seize the opportunity furnished by the collapse of the Russian campaign and turn against France. The third, from privy councillor Albrecht, was more circumspect and warned the king not to underestimate Napoleon’s remaining potential.
²⁸
Only when Austria’s strength was fully engaged in the common cause should Prussia risk open aggression against the French forces.