Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform 1807

"The author of this book is Peter Paret who, with Michael Howard , is the translator of the current most widely read English translation of On War , and indeed a translation that really put On War firmly on the map. This book, Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform , is Peter Paret’s doctoral thesis, supervised as it happens partly by Michael Howard, and completed at King’s College, London. Why it particularly appeals to me is that it unites the detailed inward-looking side of military history with a broader context. I think for many military historians of my generation, it was one of the first books of military history that showed that you could write something that was really focused on tactics—the business of fighting and very specific to professional armies and what they do—and yet put it in a broader political and social context. Paret takes an argument about how far, in the 18th century, armies were moving to looser infantry formations, away from close-order drill, how they were using, possibly, rifles (which were still in a relatively early stage of development) as opposed to smooth-bore muskets, so that they could fire more accurately, and the context within which that happened on the battlefield. And what Paret says is, ‘It’s not just about that. This is about whether Prussia will reform itself.’ Because Prussia was still a society that had serfdom. It was still a society which, in many respects, was dominated by an aristocracy. What this new form of fighting suggested was an army made up of citizens, of free people, soldiers better able to take their own decisions. Because if they were in open-order, they would not be under direct command and supervision. They would be shooting at longer ranges and more independently and not having some sergeant standing at the back, beating them and telling them what they should do. And so to change your drill, to change your tactics, you actually had to change the social composition, the political basis on which your army was formed. “To change your drill, to change your tactics, you actually had to change the social composition” I was a young lecturer (well, age 30) at Sandhurst in the late seventies when I read it. I remember speaking to other people in the war studies department and we all said, ‘We wish we could write a book like that!’ A book where if we’re talking about armies and what they’re doing, we’re not just talking to ourselves. We’re setting it within a much wider framework. And the question in our minds was, was this applicable across other armies? Other armies, at that same time, were going through a comparable tactical debate. Can we see that as a debate about politics? Well, in some ways, in the French Revolution —and that is of course the context against which this is all set—you can. There you have a society that is transforming itself through revolution. But when you look to the British army in the same period it’s pretty hard. There are clearly social implications, soldiers are being dealt with in a more benign way, discipline becomes rather more based on expression rather than repression. But actually, I think it just happened to work very well for Prussia. And this, of course, is Clausewitz’s army. There is a connection between this book and On War. Yorck von Wartenburg was a conservative officer who resisted change. He commanded the Prussian contingent, which formed part of Napoleon’s army, for the invasion of Russia in 1812. And Clausewitz was so cross, as a potential German nationalist, by the subordination of Prussia to this terrible man Napoleon that he resigned from the Prussian army and fought with the Russians against Prussia. And then, at the end of the 1812 campaign, Yorck took the Prussian contingent, changed sides, and joined the Russians. Clausewitz was there at that moment, at Tauroggen, and they met. It’s a wonderful story of the interaction of personalities within this wider context of the broad occurrence of revolutionary arguments. Yes, absolutely. And of course, after the defeat of the Prussian army at Jena in 1806, these were real issues. You could hold the lid on these arguments until 1806, but once the army—which was so closely identified with the Fredrickian state—was broken, even those who might be reactionary had to be progressive, if they were going to enable Prussia to recover and re-establish its army. I remember the guy who was later in the Bannon team under Trump, Sebastian Gorka. He organised a conference on irregular warfare in Washington at the tail end of the surge in Iraq. I was the only Brit there, but the endeavour was to bring together some of the lessons of insurgency and counter-insurgency and to encourage Obama not to lose sight of the fact that this might be the dominant pattern of contemporary conflict. And I talked about Clausewitz’s role in understanding insurgency. Of course for Americans, brought up to see Clausewitz as the embodiment of the soldier and the state, of war as a political instrument, the idea of the Clausewitz of 1806 to 1812 or 1813 as a putative insurgent, overthrowing the authority of the state and not subordinate to political authority, was entirely fresh. Very little of that is evident in On War , unless you know enough German to read the other things that Clausewitz was writing. But once you realise just how much he was, essentially, a fifth column within the monarchical view of Prussia, then you begin to read On War differently too. It’s a great romantic affair. It was a prolonged courtship. There’s a book out on her . There she is, an aristocratic woman. He is not an aristocratic man. It’s a marriage that her parents disapproved of, but they sustained this courtship for nearly a decade. And thank goodness they did because we know a great deal more about Clausewitz as a consequence of his correspondence with her."