THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  What sort of power was the Prussian state? It was highly stratified; it carefully husbanded its resources; it emphasized loyalty to the State rather than to the dynasty; it encouraged economic growth in manufactures, trade, and agriculture rather than stripping these enterprises of their wealth for the Crown; and it derived all of these imperatives from a desire to create and maintain an army well beyond what most observers would have regarded as its means. In Frederick's view, the State must assure a careful balance between classes within the State, and between economic power and the diversion of economic resources to the military. To accomplish this he insisted that only members of the nobility could serve as officers, and that noble lands could not be sold to peasants or townsmen; that peasant lands must not be absorbed by bourgeois or noble acquisition, and that only those peasants who could be spared from agricultural duties should be recruited to the army; and that townspeople were most useful to the state as producers of wealth and thus “should be guarded as the apple of one's eye.” Frederick's soldiers felt no great loyalty to him as a person. Indeed, in his political memoir, he confides that, during the first Silesian wars, “he had made a special effort to impress upon his officers the idea of fighting for the country of Prussia.”

  In all of these respects, Frederick the Great typified the ruler of a territorial state.65 His objectives were territorial and statist, rather than dynastic and personal or religious. It is intriguing that even the training of troops reflected the attributes of the state Frederick created, but not so surprising because the state itself had been crafted to provide resources and a structure for warfare. This is evident in the iron discipline that Frederick instilled in the Prussian forces. The goal of this discipline was to make the army into an instrument that could respond to a single strategic will. Frederick once remarked that his soldiers must be more afraid of their officers than of their enemies.66 Officers and men must understand that every act “is the work of a single man.” “No one reasons, everyone executes.” Men who are trained to march smartly can also turn quickly and in unison in battle. At Lentzen, Frederick's men suddenly began a flank attack with an about-face.67 An army thus trained can achieve tactical mobility, becoming skilled in quickly shifting from marching order to battle order, remain steady under withering fire, and, most important, respond to a unified strategic vision. An army trained in this way, Frederick repeatedly said, could provide full scope to the art of generalship.68

  What kind of generalship was that to be? The answer is consistent with the answer to the question “what kind of statesmanship does the territorial state exact from its leaders?” Strategy, which is the art of the general, is the answer to the question posed by constitutional imperatives, the objects of the statesman. But constitutional imperatives, like the constitutional order itself, change in response to the demands of innovations acquired by strategy. A state that presents a new model, constitutionally, like the territorial state—which identifies the State with the land of its people—will succeed or fail depending on how it is able to adapt new forms of strategy to serve that model. And these new strategic forms will inevitably impose themselves on the constitutional order. The strategic innovations of Frederick and the Prussian state were so dramatically successful that they changed the shape of warfare—and of the State itself—for all Europe. Palmer observes of this new form:

  Battle, with troops so spiritually mechanized, was a methodical affair. Opposing armies were arrayed according to pattern, almost as regularly as chessmen… on each wing cavalry, artillery fairly evenly distributed along the rear, infantry battalions drawn up in two parallel solid lines… each… composed of three ranks each rank firing as at a single command while the other two reloaded…69

  According to Frederick, marching order was determined by battle order: troops should march in columns so arrayed that by a quick turn the column presented itself as a rank, firing in lines with cavalry on its flanks. Because a battle order of long unbroken lines was as vulnerable as it was murderous, Frederick designed the “oblique order,” which involved the advance of one wing by successive echelons while the other wing remained steady, minimizing exposure to the weaker end. This either gained a quick victory by a flanking attack, rolling up the enemy's line or, if failing, tended to minimize losses as the hitherto static wing maneuvered to cover the withdrawal of the extended wing. Such a general tends to avoid cataclysmic engagements; he looks for set battles, preferably sieges, and tries to acquire fortresses. Forts, Frederick wrote, were “mighty nails which hold a ruler's provinces together.” Generalship of this kind is after all territorial, both tactically and strategically: “To win a battle means to compel your opponent to yield you his [territorial] position.”

  These military ideas were a dimension of Frederick's overall views as a statesman, and it was Frederick who succeeded William III as the model of the territorial state leader.70 He carefully maneuvered to augment his state with territory that would actually contribute to the wealth71 or territorial integrity of the state—rather than vindicate dynastic claims—and that could be gained at reasonable costs in concert with the other powers of Europe. The most striking example of this was the result of the First Partition of Poland, whereby, only nine years after the end of the Seven Years' War, Prussia, Austria, and Russia made substantial territorial acquisitions while avoiding conflict. Frederick gives us his view of this incident in his History of My Own Times:

  This was one of the most important acquisitions which we could make, because it joined Pomerania and Eastern Prussia; as it rendered us masters of the Vistula we gained the double advantage of a defensible frontier to the kingdom and the power to levy considerable tolls on the Vistula, by which river the whole trade of Poland was carried on.72

  Once this vital property was gained—it closed Prussia's territorial gap along the Baltic coast—Frederick immediately moved to improve it. Craftsmen, artisans, manufacturers, educators were all sent to colonize the area; marshes were drained; the Vistula was connected to the Oder and to the Elbe by a great canal.

  Frederick was both a beneficiary and a strong supporter of the Utrecht system, even if he had made his debut on the European stage by a successful coup de main within that system.

  The ambitious should consider above all that armaments and military discipline being much the same through Europe, and alliances as a rule producing an equality of force between belligerent parties, all that princes can expect from the greatest advantages at present is to acquire, by accumulation of successes, either some small city on the frontier or some territory which will not pay interest on the expense of the war [required to take it].73

  He saw clearly enough that war should be undertaken in proximity to one's own frontiers, because of the “difficulty of providing food supplies at points distant from the frontier, and in furnishing the new recruits, new horses, clothing and munitions of war.”74 Above all, he relied on forces that, however well-drilled, had no moral enthusiasm or political conviction. For this reason he could not rely on his armies to live off occupied countries because they would desert if dispersed to forage, and their morale would collapse if their supplies were not regularly refreshed. For the same reason, his alliances were solely matters of strategic calculation, and thus he could never depend on support from ideologically sympathetic local parties in the countries he invaded. In order to preserve the authoritarian constitutional structure of the Prussian state, Frederick dared not excite the energy that lay dormant in nationalism. Indeed, this was the challenge of the territorial state: to make the State, rather than the person of the king, the object of constitutional and strategic concern without permitting the people to claim the State as their own. “My land,” “my country,” but not “my nation.” All of this stands in stark contrast to the style of warfare epitomized by Frederick the Great's successor as the leading commander in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte.75

  In contrast to the absolutism of the kingly state, the territorial state was a state of definite limits. We have
seen this to be the case in the composition and maintenance of its armies. The governments of territorial states were limited in the revenue base they could derive from their subjects because the territorial state depended for its legitimacy on a compact with the estates of the realm, and not on the axiomatic dynastic rights of an absolute ruler. Nor could these governments draw on the entire human resources of the state: typically the aristocracy was privileged to officer the army and the state. (The kingly state was more meritocratic in this respect.) The people, insofar as they were a material factor in the strategic calculations of the territorial state, were simply taxable assets to be encouraged, and not too much disturbed, by the occasional warfare of the state. Frederick the Great wrote that he “wanted to fight [his] wars without the peasant behind his plow and the townsman in his shop even being aware of them.”76 The role of the citizen did not require that he take part in war. Sound political economy counseled that armies should be composed of men who were the least necessary, economically, to the well-being of the state. The aristocratic officer corps scarcely demanded from the marginal persons they commanded any of the characteristics of esprit that the officers expected of themselves. Rather they relied on good physical care, medical attention, adequate housing, and regular pay to motivate their troops. The rise of large standing armies under the kingly state had resulted in the systematic use of billeting. Troops were assigned to private houses, taverns, and stables. After the Seven Years' War, however, the new territorial states of Europe increasingly housed their forces in barracks, isolated from the surrounding populations. It was expected that enlisted men would freely desert if allowed to reconnoiter in small parties and that both officers and men would change sides if presented with the promise of more attractive employment.

  Professional armies were expensive and the extensive drill required by eighteenth century tactics meant that the territorial state had a great investment in each soldier. Large-scale pitched battles were seldom risked. Marshal Saxe in his Reveries de Guerre (1732) made the much-quoted statement: “I do not favor pitched battles, especially at the beginning of a war, and I am convinced that a skillful general could make war all his life without being forced into one.” Armies in Europe at this time became, in Clausewitz's words, like “a State within a State, in which the element of violence gradually faded away.”

  The delimited territorial state thus produced a delimited warfare, fought with limited means for limited objectives. Wars of position prevailed over wars of attrition, and precisely because battles were so deadly they were largely avoided and were not decisive when they occurred. Thus even though there were technological breakthroughs, particularly in the ability to deliver firepower, and therefore casualty rates rose appreciably during this period, the abundant possibilities for decisive military action ironically prevented the hegemony of any one state. Small sovereignties that had been active participants in earlier eras however—Cologne, Wurtemberg, Münster, Bremen, Genoa, Hesse—virtually disappeared. War became an activity of the Great Powers because only they could control territory significant enough to finance its defense in an era in which terri-ory itself was the medium of exchange of power.

  Prior to the arrival of the territorial state, rights of succession had been the principal source of interstate dispute. These were legal rights, based on ancient titles, marriages, cessions, that didn't merely provide the monarch with a patrimony, but established his right to rule. As Holsti has put it, “The territories that reverted to a prince, king or queen were less significant than the rights that inhered in them.”77 But in the eighteenth century, concerns for succession began to relate less to the right to rule—who had the better claim to succeed—than to the power to control territory. To paraphrase Luard slightly, control over territory no longer resulted from a credible claim; the claim resulted from a credible control over territory.78 We have only to compare the careful preparations of Louis XIV to place a Bourbon prince on the throne of Spain—the thwarted dowry, the Spanish wife, the secret agreement with the other principal contending family—with Frederick's casual pretexts regarding his Silesian claims. Once he decided to move against Austria, Frederick directed a subordinate to work up a case that Silesia really belonged to Prussia; on being presented with the results, Frederick replied with amusement that the official had proved to be a good charlatan.

  Indeed even in the selection of monarchs, sorting out the dynastic priority among competing legal claims became subordinated to aligning the decision with overriding strategic purposes. Dynasts themselves in this era ceased to think of territory in terms of family patrimony but rather as a commodity—the currency of great power relations that it had become. Dynastic rights were now fig leaves for territorial claims.

  This was the era of the great territorial partitions: in 1772 of Poland by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; in 1773, of Swedish possessions by Russia, Denmark, and Prussia. Territory could be traded to avoid or terminate a war, disregarding entirely its legal associations with family compacts, marriages, and titles.79 In place of the princely pursuit of titles and their appurtenant rights, once the coin of European patrimonial conflict, states struggled to gain or hold territory per se. Territorial conflicts became the chief source of war in this period, not simply because land was essential to national power—providing a population from which to conscript, a base of revenue and trade—for this had always been the case, but rather because legitimacy too now came from the sheer control of territory. A state that could consolidate its holdings, shedding noncontiguous family properties that were vulnerable to predation, could build itself a strategic position of relative invulnerability, and this alone was enough to assure its position among the other powers of Europe. Otherwise, it faced steady losses of its territory, even the threat of partition by a coalition. The balance of military technology and tactics was such that no state could hope for the wholesale patrilineal annexation of another—the vindication of a dynastic claim—yet every state was vulnerable to having a province picked off at its borders. The stereotypical view of eighteenth century conflict as indecisive reflects, as Jeremy Black effectively showed, an oversimplification of the political context.

  18th century conflicts do appear inconclusive because they were frequently coalition conflicts and… coalition warfare could inhibit a determination to achieve decisive results. [Moreover] governments did not necessarily wish to make their allies too powerful by weakening their rivals excessively.80

  This reticence lay in the nature of the constitutional basis for the territorial state and not in a lack of decisive military technology or ambition.

  Pikemen had been hitherto used to protect musketeers from attack by cavalry and by other pikemen; now bayonets fulfilled this role and more because they added a firepower the pike could not provide. It had always been difficult to maintain the necessary ratio between pikemen and musketeers once a battle began; the bayonet effectively solved this problem. The deployment of the flintlock musket, in which powder was ignited by a spark caused by the striking of flint on steel, produced a lighter, more reliable weapon that, with the aid of cartridges, doubled the rate of fire. Both of these changes swept through the armies of Europe: Prussia adopted the bayonet in 1689, one year after Louvois had instructed Vauban to produce a prototype; Denmark followed suit in 1690. At the battle of Fleurus that year some Imperial units attracted universal attention when they repulsed repeated French cavalry charges though unsupported by pikemen and armed only with muskets. The French abandoned the pike in 1703, the British the next year. The Austrians adopted the flintlock in 1689, the Swedes in 1696, the Danes and the British by 1700.

  From the late seventeenth century onward, especially in Prussia, Holland, and Britain, a new kind of regime was supplanting the king-centered states of which Louis XIV's was exemplar. The primacy of infantry fire made a well-trained and well-disciplined force more valuable than ever but, constitutionally, the state that fielded that force had to justify doing so on some basis more substantial th
an the vanity of the monarch. During this period, successful military powers were changing the compact that legitimated the state, and this, in the field relationship I have been describing, led to strategic innovation. The crises of legitimacy that brought William of Orange to the British throne and crushed the reign of James II epitomized this change, but it was going on in many states.

  The new order was distinguished by a view of the State as a solar system rather than the reflection of the personality of a sun king. Hume expresses this point of view in his 1753 essay “Commerce,” in which he takes up Machiavelli's subject, the State, and transforms it into a marveling disquisition on the state as an invisible mechanism, enabling growth and the creation of wealth. No less a champion of this idea, though it may be shocking to say so, was Frederick the Great, who ceaselessly portrayed himself as the servant of the State, frugally husbanding its material assets and prudently attending to the increase of its efficiencies. This era, the Age of the ancien regime—before the dawning of an acute national self-consciousness but after the mannered rejection of the hubristic pyrotechnics of the kingly state—was characterized by the adroit use of strategic and tactical positioning.

  Its military aspect was in perfect harmony with the constitutional modesty of its regimes. If, at other turns of the wheel, a strategic innovation or constitutional cataclysm signaled the new era, the introduction of the territorial state came with the exhaustion that followed the end of the vast European civil conflict, the Thirty Years' War. We can almost date its inception to the beheading of the monarch of the English kingly state, Charles I, in 1649.