is very different from those of his predecessors. With an army organized
on the customary system, and trained and equipped, better indeed, but
still on the same lines as those of his rivals, the king of Prussia
achieved results out of all proportion to those imagined by contemporary
soldiers. It is to his campaigns, therefore, that the student must refer
for the real, if usually latent, possibilities of the army of the 18th
century. The prime secret of his success lay in the fact that he was his
own master, and responsible to no superior for the uses to which he put
his men. This position had never, since the introduction of standing
armies, been attained by any one, even Eugene and Leopold of Dessau
being subject to the common restriction; and with this extraordinary
advantage over his opponents, Frederick had further the firmness and
ruthless energy of a great commander. Prussia, moreover, was more
strictly organized than other countries, and there was relatively little
of that opposition of local authorities to the movement of troops which
was conspicuous in Austria. The military successes of Prussia,
therefore, up to 1757, were not primarily due to the system and the
formal tactics, but were the logical outcome of greater energy in the
leading, and less friction in the administration, of her armies. But the
conditions were totally different in 1758-1762, when the full force of
the alliance against Prussia developed itself in four theatres of war.
Frederick was driven back to the old methods of making war, and his men
were no longer the soldiers of Leuthen and Hohenfriedberg. If discipline
was severe before, it was merciless then; the king obtained men by force
and fraud from every part of Germany, and had both to repress and to
train them in the face of the enemy. That under such conditions, and
with such men, the weaker party finally emerged triumphant, was indeed a
startling phenomenon. Yet its result for soldiers was not the production
of the national army, though the dynastic forces had once more shown
themselves incapable of compassing decisive victories, nor yet the
removal of the barrier between army and people, for the operations of
Frederick's recruiting agents made a lasting impression, and, further,
large numbers of men who had thought to make a profession of arms were
turned adrift at the end of the war. On the contrary, all that the great
and prolonged _tour de force_ of these years produced was a tendency,
quite in the spirit of the age, to make a formal science out of the art
of war. Better working and better methods were less sought after than
systematization of the special practices of the most successful
commanders. Thus Frederick's methods, since 1758 essentially the same as
those of others, were taken as the basis of the science now for the
first time called "strategy," the fact that his opponents had also
practised it without success being strangely ignored. Along with this
came a mania for imitation. Prussian drill, uniforms and hair-powder
were slavishly copied by every state, and for the next twenty years, and
especially when the war-trained officers and men had left active
service, the purest pedantry reigned in all the armies of Europe,
including that of Prussia. One of the ablest of Frederick's subordinates
wrote a book in which he urged that the cadence of the infantry step
should be increased by one pace per minute. The only exceptions to the
universal prevalence of this spirit were in the Austrian army, which was
saved from atrophy by its Turkish wars, and in a few British and French
troops who served in the American War of Independence. The British
regiments were sent to die of fever in the West Indies; when the storm
of the French Revolution broke over Europe, the Austrian army was the
only stable element of resistance.