Soldier Emperor
Prussia in the Napoleonic Wars,
Part Three
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
September 2023

Along with half of her territory, half of her population and more than half of her revenue base, the disastrous war of 1806-1807 also forced the Kingdom of Prussia to part with most of her army – the foundation of Prussia’s briefly-held Great Power status. The 1808 Treaty of Paris placed the number of troops at 36,000. The Prussians immediately cheated on this limit, maintaining about 45,000 men, but this was still less than one-fifth of the total fielded in 1806.

A clique of younger officers took the opportunity to press for wide-ranging reforms in the Prussian Army, or what was left of it. Friedrich Wilhelm III allowed a reform commission to take over the re-structuring of the Prussian Army, but its work would be subject to constant French demands that the king overturn its recommendations. Still, a great many changes would be made, both openly and secretly.

Scharnhorst led the commission, assisted by August von Gneisenau, Leopold von Boyen and most crucially Baron Heinrich von Stein, the king’s newly-appointed chief minister. With the king withdrawn into a deep depression and the conservatives who had guided Prussian policy for a generation discredited and demoralized by Prussia’s shattering defeat, Stein seized near-dictatorial powers which he used to enact a sweeping reform agenda.

Stein abolished serfdom in Prussia, issuing a decree on his first day in office. Nobles lost their preference in land ownership, class distinctions in occupations went away, and cities, towns and large villages all obtained self-rule. Scharnhorst modelled his military reforms to follow Stein’s civil reforms; with class-based barriers to careers now swept away, educated middle-class young men could be given officers’ commissions. This change became even more important in 1810, when Napoleon ordered that all foreigners must be discharged from the Prussian Army immediately (since most of these men were Germans, this move secured additional officers for Napoleon’s satellite kingdoms as well as crippling Prussia).

Stein’s reforming ways came to a quick end; French agents intercepted a letter in which he called for the liberation of Germany from French rule and the Emperor declared him an “Enemy of France.” He went into exile, eventually settling in Russia, but while new reforms slowed Napoleon did not demand the reversal of existing policies, since most of these corresponded to French practice.

The reform commission in action. Scharnhorst, standing center, delivers his ideas to the king (seated) while Stein (civilian dress) looks on.

Scharnhorst matched the abolition of serfdom with a ban on corporal punishment – once the hallmark of Prussian military service – for all but the most extreme offenses. Promotion would be based on merit, in parallel with Stein’s civil reforms. Still, Scharnhorst did not get his way on every step, as the king had also added conservatives to the commission like Massenbach, the comically incompetent “evil genius of Prussia,” and the chronically-insubordinate but forward-thinking Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg.

Other new steps included professional schools for staff officers, artillery, and engineers (a staff college already existed, but now would be enlarged and modernized). The Prussian Army would adopt a modern staff organization and force structure, initially formed six brigades of all arms (infantry, cavalry and artillery). Lacking a charismatic genius like Napoleon, Scharnhorst would offset that lack with a corps of highly-trained staff officers. At the very least, they could check impulsive bad ideas hatched by inexperienced commanders.

The 58 infantry regiments of 1806 dropped to 12 (now including the Guard), six grenadier battalions, two jäger battalions and one rifle battalion. The cavalry numbered four regiments of cuirassiers (one of them Guard), six of dragoons, six of hussars and three of uhlans (one of these Guard as well).

Scharnhorst himself hatched the idea known as the “Krümper System” (in East Prussian dialect, a Krümper was a raw recruit). Each infantry company would discharge 20 men after basic training, replacing them with 20 more raw recruits (Krümpern) and then repeating the process to build up a large reserve of trained men.

That was the theory; the reality was that most company commanders either discharged their worst soldiers or ignored the order outright; since it had to be issued in secret, they couldn’t very well be reprimanded for not obeying it. And some may have simply never received the memo. Even had the system worked as planned, it would not have built up a very large reserve (certainly not tripling Prussia’s trained manpower, as Scharnhorst hoped) and it would not provide those recruits with matching numbers of officers and NCO’s. Just how many additional men the Krümper System added is hard to discern, since the totals of Prussian manpower include soldiers discharged after the 1806-07 debacle and recalled to the colors later.

The king, fearing French reaction, rejected universal conscription in 1810, but the Prussian Army did modernize its tactics in new manuals issued in 1812. The new methods, based on the experiences of the Napoleonic wars to date, emphasized combined-arms cooperation between infantry, cavalry, and artillery.

The biggest spur to rebuilding the Prussian Army came from Napoleon himself. In early 1812 he directed the Prussians to provide an auxiliary corps of 30,000 men to assist in his planned invasion of Russia. Since that would involve just about every Prussian soldier, at the same time he authorized an increase in the Prussian Army’s peacetime strength by another 33,000 men. That directive, far more than the Krümper System, allowed the Prussian Army to increase its numbers. Arming and equipping huge numbers would have been beyond the means of the Prussian treasury in any event, following the loss of tax-payers in 1807.

The Prussian Auxiliary Corps sent into Russia did not come close to the demanded size; instead of 30,000 men, the Prussians provided just over 20,000. The corps included an avant-garde of cavalry and light infantry (jäger and fusilier), and two infantry brigades, one with six battalions and two batteries and the other with five battalions and two batteries. With a palace guard of one fusilier battalion and a small reserve of cavalry and artillery, the corps amounted to a reinforced division and would be subject to command of the French X Corps.

Napoleon selected Julius von Grawert, a division commander in 1806, to lead the force. Grawert led his corps to victory at Ekau in Latvia in July, a month after the invasion began, but fell from his horse and broke his leg. Yorck, his second-in-command, took over.

Riga is burning. July 1812.

Though Yorck was perhaps the most ardently patriotic of the Prussian generals, he led the corps competently and the Prussians fought well alongside their uneasy French allies. The Prussians participated in the siege of Riga, and despite frosty relations with his French superior, Jacques MacDonald, and entreaties from the Russians to join them, Yorck fought his corps well during the siege, holding his lines and repeatedly turning back Russian counter-attacks.

The siege carried on even as Napoleon retreated from Moscow in October. The Emperor did not admit the extent of the disaster until a bulletin issued on 3 December 1812; on the 18th, MacDonald ordered Yorck to withdraw from the lines in front of Riga along with the rest of the besieging force.

During the retreat, the Prussians became separated from the rest of X Corps. Russian envoys showed up on the 25th, soon joined by the Baron von Stein and Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian officer then in Russian service and already well-known as a military theoretician. Yorck refused to switch sides, but finally agreed to a pact declaring the Prussian corps neutral. This Convention of Tauroggen, signed on 30 December, received widespread acclamation from the Prussian upper classes; the lower classes did not care one way or the other. King Friedrich Wilhelm III fired Yorck, but the Russians refused to allow the messengers bearing news of his dismissal through their lines and in any event, Yorck refused to leave his post.

Yorck’s corps marched into Königsberg on 8 January, but the general clung to his statement of neutrality, refusing to help the Russians fight the French. The king and his court fled Berlin, and on the last day of February 1813 the Prussians surprised no one by signing a formal treaty of alliance with the Russians. Now the restored Prussian Army would take the field against Napoleon once again.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his new puppy. He misses his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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