Though many of the figures central to the reform of the Prussian army and state that took place between the battle of Jena-Auerstadt (1806) and the final defeat of Napoleon (1815) were of humble birth, none came from circumstances more desperate than those of August Neidhardt von Gneisenau.
Gneisenau was born on the 27th of October, 1760, just a few days before the battle of Torgau. His father was a lieutenant in the service of one of the petty states of the Holy Roman Empire, then at war with Prussia. His mother was a woman who, like many others of her generation, had followed her husband on campaign.
Though the battle of Torgau had been indecisive, the Imperial forces responded to the draw by retreating. Gneisenau’s mother, though fortunate to have a wagon in which to travel, was severely tried by the twin ordeals of childbirth and the retreat. One night, she was so exhausted that the child slipped from her arms and out of the wagon.
Rescued by a grenadier, the infant was returned to his mother just in time to see her die. Gneisenau spent the next two years of his life in the care of a soldier’s wife, who followed in the wake of the army much as Gneisenau's mother had done. After the war, Gneisenau's father moved to Thuringia and remarried. The young Gneisenau, too poor even to wear shoes, lived the threadbare existence of the stepson in the family of an impecunious, and somewhat irresponsible former officer.
Gneisenau’s existence was eventually discovered by his mother’s parents. Despite his plebeian name of Müller, Gneisenau’s maternal grandfather was an officer. Colonel Müller and his wife lived in Würzburg, in Bavaria, and were sufficiently well-to-do to provide Gneisenau with an excellent education.
In 1773, when he was 13, Gneisenau’s grandparents died. As a result, the future general rejoined his father, now living in Erfurt. Happily, fortune had smiled on the former lieutenant, and the adolescent Gneisenau was able to attend the Gymnasium at Erfurt. In 1777, at the age of 17, Gneisenau entered the University at Erfurt, where he studied mathematics and public administration. In 1778, however, his father died, and he was, for the third time in his life, made an orphan. Able to depend on no one but himself, he decided to become a soldier.
After a year in the Austrian service, Gneisenau heart that the Margrave of Ansbach was recruiting troops to fight against the rebellious American colonists. Enlisting as a cadet, Gneisenau was soon promoted to the rank of lieutenant. In 1782, he sailed with a boatload of other “Hessians” for Halifax, Nova Scotia, then one of the few North American ports still in British hands.
By the time Gneisenau landed, the American War of Independence was over. After a few months in Nova Scotia, he returned to Ansbach. Though he had failed to cross bayonets with anyone during his brief journey, the experience seems to have had a profound effect on the young officer. Indeed, many historians trace Gneisenau’s interest in light infantry, sharpshooting, the “small war,” and particularly, the relationship between patriotism and tactics, to the tales he heard from those who had fought against Washington’s army.
In 1785 Gneisenau entered the Prussian service. As the “low man on the totem pole” in a new army, he was assigned to the dreary garrison of Löwenberg, in the still largely Polish province of Silesia. Always one to make the best of his situation, Gneisenau spent his ten years in Silesia improving his knowledge of history, languages, and the military arts and sciences.
Gneisenau proved popular with the local aristocracy. He was an accomplished conversationalist, passable musician, and could sketch with facility. He was also blessed with a good voice and the ability to extemporize verse.
Despite these talents, Gneisenau suffered from the poverty that would visit him intermittently throughout his life. Thus, he experienced periods when, embarrassed by his inability to afford so simple a commodity as beer, he would retire to his room and refuse to receive guests. Though this was a period in which the Prussian Army was actively (though never decisively) involved in campaigns in the Netherlands and the Rhineland, Gneisenau’s only active service during this period was a brief expedition into Poland to combat the spread of an epidemic.
In 1795 Gneisenau was made captain of a company of fusiliers. At this time, these were a species of infantry that were neither fully “light” nor fully “line.” That is to say, though they were dressed in green, they were not as care- fully selected or well-trained as Jäger. Likewise, though they were exercised in close order fighting, they rarely reached the standard of precision and solidity associated with Prussian grenadiers. Though a small number of sharpshooters were assigned to each company of fusiliers, the majority of them were equipped with smoothbore muskets. These, however, in contrast to those which equipped many line companies, were at least provided with a curved stock. This permitted some semblance of aimed fire.
The captaincy of a company brought Gneisenau some relief from his poverty. In keeping with the custom of the time, he was as much a “subcontractor” to the army as an official. Thus, he was able to make a small profit off of the money paid to him by the state for the feeding, clothing, and equipping of his troops.
The modest degree of prosperity resulting from his promotion permitted Gneisenau to marry Caroline von Kottwitz, the former fiancée of a comrade killed in a duel. (Indeed, were it not for the duel and Gneisenau’s consequent volunteering to break the sad news to Fraülein von Kottwitz, the couple might never have met.) The marriage was both happy and fruitful, with Frau Hauptmann von Gneisenau bearing her husband seven children.
In addition to the cares of professional and domestic life, Gneisenau found time to continue his studies of French, English, and Italian; to lecture on and write books about fortification; to read military books; to organize a play; and to manage a small estate that he had bought.
This activity seems to have reflected more than industry. Spurred, perhaps, by the poverty of his youth, Gneisenau was ambitious. In 1801 he wrote to his wife, “I suffer from a malady that vexes few men, that is to say, I am dissatisfied with myself.”
Gneisenau’s company took part in the disastrous campaign of Jena-Auerstadt. Gneisenau himself was wounded at Saalfeld, one of the small battles that preceded the two main engagements. In the next few weeks he rallied to one Prussian force after another, barely escaping capture on a number of occasions.
Though his various enterprises had brought him to the brink of prosperity, Gneisenau adapted readily to the life of a military refugee. Noting that those who shared his hardships included the cream of Prussian society, he took so- lace in the stoicism that so often be- comes the philosophy of educated soldiers. “The difference between first and second class”, he later wrote, “is not very great, particularly when one considers things from the point of view of eternity. And this (the point of view of eternity) is the correct point of view, for there are no others beyond it.”
In less than two months, Gneisenau had walked or ridden from the western end of Prussia to Königsberg near its easternmost frontier. Dressed in the ragged remnants of a uniform, Gneisenau made use of his visit to the city of Kant to write an essay on the origins of the Prussian collapse. These, he argued, were incompetent and uncooperative leaders, an army with little experience of war, trained only for parade-ground maneuvers, full of mercenaries, old men, and fathers of families who took the first opportunities to desert, and arrogant officers incapable of learning from their enemies.
At the end of 1806, Gneisenau was promoted to the rank of major and put to work training new battalions. Within three months, these battalions were sufficiently trained to be useful for the defense of Danzig, a city threatened by the continued advance of Napoleon’s armies. It was not, however, for Gneisenau to lead his pupils in battle. Instead he was sent off, on the 29th of April, 1807, to organize the defense of Kolberg.
Kolberg, one of the last of the Prussian fortresses still in Prussian hands, was of little significance to the campaign. Gneisenau’s skillful defense of the fortress and its surrounding area, however, was one of the few bright spots in what had been a disastrous year for Prussia.
The key to Gneisenau’s nine week defense of Kolberg was his use of an active style of defense. The old fortress and the smaller outworks built during the siege were alike used by Gneisenau as aids to maneuver rather than ends in themselves. They could economize on forces, provide covering fire, canalize enemy movement, and otherwise co- operate with mobile forces. At no point, however, were they expected to resist the French by passive means alone.
On the 2nd of July, 1807, Gneisenau received news that Prussia and France had signed an armistice. Both the war and the siege were over. Gneisenau’s reward for his accomplishments was promotion to lieutenant colonel, the award of the coveted Pour le Mérite, and, most important of all for the future history of Prussia, appointment to the Military Reorganization Commission.
Chaired by General Scharnhorst, the Military Reorganization Commission was charged by the King with proposing remedies to the ills that had befallen the Prussian army and state in the years before 1806. Gneisenau’s contribution to the work of this commission consisted not so much of his ideas, which were nearly identical to those of Scharnhorst, but of his personal qualities. Amiable, witty, and, above all, likable where Scharnhorst was introspective, tongue-tied, and somewhat morose, Gneisenau brought a spoonful of sugar to mitigate the bitter taste of the all too necessary reforms that Scharnhorst and his colleagues would put into effect in the next six years.
During the dark days between the Peace of Tilsit of 1807 (which regularized Napoleon’s dominance over Prussia) and the beginning of the War of Liberation in 1813, the work of August Neidhardt von Gneisenau owed much to his political philosophy. In many respects, Gneisenau was what men of his generation called a “liberal.” Among other things, he believed in doing away with many of the “feudal” institutions that had grown like barnacles on the hull of the ship of state. The liberation that Gneisenau sought, however, was not that of contemporary French or British liberals.
The latter saw the state, with its armies, police power, and voracious appetite for money, as the chief enemy of liberty. Gneisenau, however, viewed the state, not merely as the agent of liberation, but as the medium through which individuals might find an outlet for their talents, as well as an escape from the pettiness and seeming futility of private life. In short, the state had the potential to give meaning to life.
This idea was widespread in Germany in Gneisenau’s time. The other members of the Prussian Reform Movement, as well as many literary men, philosophers, and even theologians, developed a similar attitude to an idealized Prussian state. Some, like the philosopher Hegel, went so far as to imbue a highly abstracted state with the attributes of Divinity.
Gneisenau’s background make him particularly susceptible to this view of the state. Though less than successful in private life and full of memories of his barefoot childhood, Gneisenau’s position in the Prussian service had given him the opportunity to obtain considerable fame, an honored position in society, and even a degree of financial security. More importantly, the Prussian state gave Gneisenau an arena in which to exercise his considerable creativity.
One of the most important corollaries of Gneisenau’s cult of the state was his belief in universal military service. On the surface, this consisted simply of abolishing the many exemptions that had kept the ablest and most productive members Prussia’s population out of the ranks of the Army. The implications of this simple change, for both the Army and Prussian society, were many.
An army based on the principle of universal military service would have to use a different sort of discipline than a force consisting of vagabonds, mercenaries, and the younger sons of the poorest class of peasants and artisans.
In particular, the degrading punishments and conditions of service that made military life so repugnant to those possessed of even a little education or position in civil life would have to change. Fear would have to be replaced by more positive sentiments - patriotism, ambition, and comradeship - as the chief means of maintaining discipline. Thus, while contemporaries may have condemned the lash, the running of the gauntlet, and the arbitrary beatings from purely humanitarian grounds, Gneisenau seems to have been primarily motivated by the need to bring out the best in every soldier.
Similar sentiments led Gneisenau to advocate the breaking of the nobility’s monopoly on officership in the infantry and heavy cavalry regiments. (The less prestigious arms - the engineers, the artillery, the Jäger, the fusiliers, and the light cavalry - already contained a large number of non-noble officers.) “While the kingdom wallows in senility and dishonor,” Gneisenau wrote, “there is, perhaps, in some miserable village a Caesar guiding a plow or an Epaminondas who has trouble earning his daily bread.”
In May of 1808, Gneisenau was made a member of the Artillery and Engineer Committee and Inspector of Fortresses. In September of the same year, the duties of Chief of Engineers were added. These appointments may have reflected Gneisenau’s achievements in the defense of Kolberg. They may also have been the result of an attempt by Gneisenau’s enemies at court to have him “kicked upstairs” or kept too busy to get involved in politics. (The task of rebuilding and refurbishing Prussia’s fortresses, after all, was a huge task that required a great deal of time on the road. Indeed, two and a half years would pass before Gneisenau would be able to visit his family. When he did, his children failed to realize who he was.)
Despite these distractions, Gneisenau was full of projects for assembling Prussian forces to the point where they could throw off the Napoleonic yoke. Gneisenau gauged the power of Napoleon to be so great, however, that only the full energies of the Prussian people would suffice to create and support an army strong enough to win. Thus, in a famous memorandum of the year 1808, Gneisenau argued for the formation of a national assembly and the granting of a constitution as the chief pillars of an attempt to give the majority of Prussians a stake in the outcome of the project.
In April of 1809, Austria rekindled the embers of its long conflict with Napoleon. Gneisenau’s first thought was the creation of a Prussian legion to fight alongside the Austrians until a proper alliance between Prussia and Austria could be arranged. Before Gneisenau could start lobbying for these projects, he was transferred to Königsberg. In the meantime, other Germans were taking up arms against Napoleon. The Duke of Brunswick-Oels, at the head of his famous “Black Brunswickers,” invaded Saxony. (Saxony was then allied to France.)
Another black-coated formation, the Freikorps of Major von Schill, played the role of Gneisenau’s Prussian legion. Schill’s famous (and entirely unofficial) diversionary expedition, however, was not the prelude to an Austro-Prussian alliance that Gneisenau hoped for. Instead, Prussia remained neutral, allowing Napoleon to concentrate his forces against Austria.
Not one to give up easily, Gneisenau asked for leave. His plan was to travel to England, there to ask the British government to organize an amphibious landing along the Baltic or North Sea coast of Germany. A sizable force, supplied by sea, could, Gneisenau hoped, do for a German uprising against Napoleon what Sir John Moore and Sir Arthur Wellesley’s forces in the Peninsula were doing for Spanish and Portuguese resistance.
Gneisenau traveled to London via Sweden. While en route, he heard the news of Napoleon’s victory at Wagram and, while in London, learned that the British government was more interested in an expedition to Antwerp than a land- ing in North Germany. After that expedition had been repulsed and Austria had made peace with Napoleon, Gneisenau returned to Berlin. Arriving in the Prussian capital in June of 1810, he discovered that he was not welcome there. He therefore returned to his estate at Mittel-Kauffung and spent the fall and winter of 1810 putting his long- neglected personal finances in order.
Inspired by the defense of the “lines of Torres Vedras” in Spain and remembering, no doubt, his own success at Kolberg, Gneisenau dreamed of a campaign in which the handful of fortresses that remained in Prussian hands would tie down the bulk of the French army. By the summer of 1811, these plans had grown into a full-blown project for “people’s war.”
This time the inspiration seems to have come, not merely from the regular operations of the Peninsular Campaign, but from the guerrilla fighting that went on behind and between the armies. The administration of conquered provinces, Gneisenau argued, should refuse to cooperate with the French. The Prussian population should oppose French requisitions, ambush French convoys, and, in general, cooperate with the small regular army in the way that Spanish guerrillas cooperated with the Wellington’s small force.
As might be expected from a monarch who preferred French domination to the prospect of an armed populace, King Frederick William was not thrilled with Gneisenau’s concept for turning Prussia into a flatter, colder version of the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, instead of resisting France, Frederick William signed, on the eve of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, an alliance with the French Emperor.
Some of the Prussian reformers, such as Carl von Clausewitz, responded to this development by resigning their commissions and offering their swords to the Russian Tsar. Scharnhorst retired to the country. Gneisenau left Prussia and, with the tacit approval of King Frederick William (who seems to have been interested in purchasing an insurance policy against Napoleon’s defeat), went abroad to solicit support for a new coalition against Napoleon.
In Vienna, Gneisenau visited the Archduke Charles. In Riga he wrote a memoir for the Tsar, arguing that Napoleon’s army could not withstand the rigors of the Russian climate. In Sweden, he met with Bernadotte, the French marshal who, soon after becoming king of Sweden, had begun to think of betraying the Emperor who had placed him on his throne. In England, he met with the Prince Regent (the future George IV.
Gneisenau’s proposals to the English indicate provide an interesting perspective on his political views. His renewed argument for an English landing in North Germany was based, not only on the need to fight Napoleon, but also on the possibility of injecting into the German body politic English ideas about constitutional government. The means for doing this was to be the creation, in northwest Germany, of an English colony.
Once again, Gneisenau’s plans were overtaken by events. While he was in England, Napoleon’s Grande Armée had been nearly destroyed at the Battle of the Beresina, and the Prussian corps that had formed part of that army had, under the command of General Yorck, defected to the Russian side. With or without the King, the Prussian War of Liberation had begun.
Despite ill-health, Gneisenau rushed back to Prussia on a ship provided by the British government. On the 25th of February, 1813, he landed at Kolberg, the site of his previous triumph.
Source: Paul Rocques “Adversaires prussiens de Napoléon,” Revue Militaire Générale, May 1914) pages 828-842 (The link will take you to Gallica, the digital repository of the French National Library.)
