The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (13 page)

And so it went for the next four or five days. The process had the semblance of order and careful planning. No one beyond the Baron's little circle knew that he was making it up as he went along. Each evening when he retired to his quarters, he took a quick dinner before returning to his desk and working out the lesson for the next day in his hastily scribbled, inelegant French, which he then gave to Duponceau for translation and revision. After several hours working by candlelight, he turned in, only to rise again at three o'clock in the morning to do it all over again—to dress, drink his coffee, and smoke his pipe, to study the day's lesson and practice the words in English.
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Then, promptly at nine o'clock, just as on the first day of training, he and his staff galloped through the snow to the Grand Parade. “There was no waiting for a tardy aide-de-camp, and those who followed wished they had not slept,” one of his assistants recalled. “Nor was there need of chiding. When duty was neglected or military etiquette infringed, the Baron's look was quite sufficient.”
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The instruction of the model company followed the same pattern each day: the review of old lessons, the separation into squads, the explanation of the new lesson for the day. Steuben's assistants would give personalized instruction to each of the squads. The Baron, in the meantime, flitted about from one squad to the next, fussing, fuming, correcting, praising. When he was satisfied that the men had been coached enough, the company reassembled and performed the new lessons again, together. And thus the instruction proceeded each morning and each afternoon. Soon the men were marching in two ranks, and making use of the faster marching pace, the “quick step” of 120 paces per minute.

The members of the model company weren't the only ones who learned from the exercises. From the very first day of instruction, the drill sessions on the Parade attracted quite a crowd of spectators. Men and officers turned out in force each day, lining the perimeter of the
Parade to watch with a mixture of amusement and awe as the Baron put the company through its paces. The men found welcome diversion in what transpired there, in the occasional comic blunders of the company, in the frantic energy of the excitable German, who acted in a manner that none of them had ever seen in an officer before. Mostly, though, what they witnessed was the complete transformation of the model company. After three or four days on the Parade, the company was able to march, wheel, and change front with a precision and speed not yet seen in Continental troops.

Steuben was aware that he and his students had become the center of attention, but he did not shrink from it. On the contrary. He drew strength and self-assurance from the admiration his men attracted, from the newfound confidence that animated their faces and buoyed their undernourished spirits as they performed increasingly complicated maneuvers to the cheers of the crowd. And the Baron, always the showman—one might say exhibitionist—gloried in the laughter that accompanied his extraordinary fits of anger when something went wrong. Pretty soon he was playing to the amusement of the crowd, intentionally exaggerating his anger in order to make the drill sessions true spectacles. He stomped and he cursed, shaking a fist or gesticulating violently with a huge finger as he called for the wrath of the gods to rain down upon his clumsier men.

His cursing was a blend of French and German obscenities, linked together by a few words of English. It was virtually unintelligible to anyone save him, but he took care to punctuate his shouted profanity with his favorite English oath, the only one he knew: “Goddam!” So long as he kept his calm, he might ask one of his bilingual assistants to translate his curses for the benefit of the men, though they really needed no translation. Sometimes he was so transported by the ferocity of his over-dramatized wrath that he sputtered until he ran out of oaths. “My dear Duponceau,” he would then call out to his translator, “come and swear for me in English, these fellows won't do what I bid them.”
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Certainly many of the Baron's apoplectic fits were genuine, but just as many were feigned, acted for the benefit of the company and the
crowd of onlookers. It amused the men, but they never found Steuben to be clownish or ridiculous. His tantrums bonded him to the men; they humanized him. He would always insist on appropriate military decorum—not allowing private soldiers to address him unless asked to do so, for in his mind it was necessary to keep some distance between those who led and those who were led. But at the same time he wanted the men to know that he was a soldier, too, that he shared their privations and their coarser instincts.

This kind of behavior came naturally to Steuben. He liked to be liked; he enjoyed working a crowd. It was also calculated, reflecting a deeper understanding of the soldiers under his command than one might expect from a foreigner who had been in America for all of four months. True, soldiers were soldiers, whether in Valley Forge or in the Breslau garrison, but there was a difference between these Americans and the Prussians he had led in his youth. Prussian soldiers, and European soldiers generally, were peasants, bred to deference. They obeyed their officers in part because they feared the consequences of disobedience, but also because they were accustomed to obeying those who ranked above them in the social hierarchy. They did not expect any kind of interaction with their officers.

But Americans, Steuben found, were not like this at all. Over the generations, they had shed much of that ingrained deference to established authority. They did not respect officers just because they were officers. Steuben's experience on the Grand Parade confirmed his initial assessment of the Continentals. On occasion, the men of the model company were not content merely to do what they had been told to do; they wanted know
why
they should do it. “The genius of this nation,” Steuben wrote to an old comrade in Prussia after the war, “is not to be compared…with that of the Prussians, Austrians, or French. You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,' and he does it; but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,' and
then
he does it.”
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Taken to extremes, this kind of attitude, Steuben knew, could be dangerous. Commanders could not lead effectively if their men were too familiar with them. But since this aspect of the American charac
ter could not be entirely suppressed, the Baron learned to work around it. Indeed, he made it a virtue, and an integral part of his training regimen. When composing his lessons for the model company, he could have relied entirely on an established military manual, picking it as the standard for the army. He could have translated the official Prussian regulations into English, for he knew these by heart. But he did neither. He created his own system, based on his experience, but one stripped of every nonessential movement, every element that did not have a practical purpose. There was no sense, with time in such short supply, in teaching the men things that they would never use and didn't need to know.

Whatever Steuben did, it was working. General Washington already wagered that it would. On March 19, the very day the model company began its training, he took the first tentative steps toward the creation of a functioning inspector general's office—without inviting or even making a single reference to Thomas Conway. The general announced the imminent appointment of an inspector general, and asked brigade commanders to nominate suitable officers as “brigade inspectors,” who would serve as Steuben's assistants in each brigade staff. Three days later, obviously impressed by the progress Steuben had made with the model company, Washington prohibited all brigade commanders from conducting drill on their own until the “new Regulations”—for such he was already calling Steuben's embryonic, still-evolving system—were put in place and distributed in writing. This was a serious step, for in writing this order, Washington was limiting the command authority of his generals. In time it would cause him some grief.
¹⁰

 

T
HE RETRAINING
of the entire army at Valley Forge began in earnest on March 24, 1778. Washington's order of March 22 had ruffled some feathers among the colonels and the brigadiers, but not enough to make him back down. He had already seen enough of the “happy Effects” of the Baron's handiwork to know that he had made
the right decision, and the painful awareness that the army was in a race against time compelled him to throw the full weight of his support behind the quirky Prussian. Horatio Gates, whom Steuben had been politic enough to keep apprised of his progress, said the same thing: “…few Armies want Discipline more than Ours…. Our Time is short, and we have much, too much to do; therefore, we should only attempt to do that which is most for our present Benefit.”
¹¹

Early on the morning of the twenty-fourth, Washington gave the order: “At nine oclock precisely all the Brigades will begin their exercise, each regiment on its own parade, and the Inspector Genl will attend the exercise.”
¹²

General Washington was now referring to Steuben publicly as “Inspector General,” a great compliment and a mark of high favor, to be sure, but an onerous burden as well. Steuben was no longer a mere volunteer, drilling a single company of men. He was now responsible for training all of the Continental infantry at Valley Forge. Washington's order put him temporarily above all other officers in the army, making him answerable to Washington alone.

The pressure to perform would be great; the grueling physical pace would be even worse. Steuben would have to supervise the training of thousands of men, riding from brigade to brigade, observing each regiment at drill, taking notes, pointing out recurring problems. And he would have to extend his “system”—which was not fully worked out yet—from the level of the company to that of regiments and brigades.

Fortunately, he would not be entirely on his own. He had the core of his staff—Duponceau, Ponthière, Francy, and Des Epiniers—and two valuable new additions, picked up by the Baron at Valley Forge as he scouted the army for untapped talent. The first of these was Lt. Col. François-Louis Teissèdre de Fleury, a brilliant twenty-nine-year-old engineer. Fleury, who had entered the Continental service early in 1777, had previously served as a staff officer in the French army; when Steuben and Duponceau made his acquaintance at York in February
1778, the Baron knew instantly that Fleury's administrative experience would come in handy.

The second newcomer was twenty-three-year-old Benjamin Walker, a British-born captain in the 2nd New York Regiment. Walker was a rare bird, an American line officer who was fluent in French. He introduced himself to Steuben one day during the training of the model company. A complicated maneuver had gone completely awry, and neither Steuben nor one of his aides was able to come up with the proper commands to restore order to the company. Walker emerged from the crowd of laughing spectators. Doffing his hat and bowing ceremoniously, he addressed the Baron in perfect French. Could His Excellency make use of his services? Steuben gratefully accepted, so moved and relieved that he embraced Walker as if he had known him for years. Soon Walker was detached from his infantry company to serve as Steuben's personal aide-de-camp. He would become one of the very few lifelong friends Steuben made in the army.
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Washington saw to it that Steuben had an adequate bureaucracy of his own. He picked four promising field officers—Col. William Davies of Virginia, Col. Francis Barber of New Jersey, Col. John Brooks of Massachusetts, and the Frenchman Ternant—to act as “sub-inspectors.” The sub-inspectors would be Steuben's immediate subordinates, supervising divisions and larger bodies of troops, intermediaries between the Baron and the brigade inspectors.
¹⁴

On March 28, as an additional mark of esteem and trust, Washington made Steuben's appointment official—or at least as official as he could:

Steuben hardly needed to be reminded of the urgency of the task. As soon as Washington directed him to take over the training of the entire army, the Baron sat down to sketch out a detailed instructional plan—a syllabus—for the coming weeks.

According to this syllabus, each new lesson would be conveyed by the Baron to the sub-inspectors and the brigade inspectors, who in turn would teach a selected twenty-man squad from each brigade. Every captain commanding an infantry company would follow suit, training his company one squad at a time, until the entire army was schooled in the basics. Then drill in larger formations would commence. No officer was exempt from participating in the drills. They would have to work as hard as the men, if not harder, and they would have to learn exactly as the men did: every afternoon, the brigade inspectors would assemble all majors, captains, and most lieutenants, drilling them on the day's lesson as if they were privates themselves. It must have been endlessly entertaining for the men, watching their proud leaders bumbling about the parade ground, muskets in hand, with the Baron stopping by occasionally to yell and curse at them when they failed to execute the lessons correctly. But in the Prussian army most officers started off in the very same way, and Steuben knew no better system of training.