The Poor Man of Toggenburg - Autobiography of Ulrich Bräker

that in former times the military bounties

had been different from those given at present, and fellows of that kind had perhaps come into better circumstances through marriage, but above all, they had known how to take care of the schillings, and only thus had the guilders been able to take care of themselves - I on the other hand knew not how to deal with the schillings, nor the guilders either. And in the end I found a mournful kind of comfort in the thought: if all else fails, once we are on campaign, the bullets will not spare these lucky fellows any more than they will spare you, you poor bungler! And so you are as good as they.

The army in which Bräker was thus unwillingly enrolled was one of the largest in Europe, and for more than a century it had borne a reputation for efficiency based on stern discipline, rigorous training and meticulous administration, every detail under the personal control of the Electors, and later the Kings, of the House of Hohenzollern. The Great Elector Frederick, who succeeded in 1640, had resolved that never again should foreign troops devastate his small conglomeration of states in the north-east of the Empire, as had happened in the bitter religious wars of the early 17th century. By the time Frederick II, known as The Great, came to the throne in 1740, the army numbered 83,000 men, drawn from a much enlarged kingdom, maintained by 5/7ths of the national revenues, and backed by a sound economy and a flourishing armaments industry.

In spite of this, at the time other European powers were not disposed to take Prussia very seriously. Frederick the Great's father, Frederick William I, was ridiculed for eccentricities such as the "Potsdam giants", a personal guard of very tall men recruited from all over Europe. He was also notorious for the physical and psychological abuse that he meted out to his son, who was thought to have little ability or inclination for the military life.

Long before his accession, however, Frederick had been planning to use his inherited resources and manpower to raise Prussia's status as a great power. In 1740 another event gave him the chance to do so. Charles VI, king of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor, died leaving as heir his daughter Maria Theresa, only twenty-three years old. Though her father in his last years had made many diplomatic and financial sacrifices to obtain her unopposed succession, not all the states of the Empire were willing to accept her rule. She was also hampered by too many advisers who were certainly older, but not necessarily wiser, than herself, and the generals of her army were also hidebound by outdated tradition.

Frederick hoped to benefit from this situation by seizing Silesia, the most northerly of the Imperial territories, valuable for mineral resources, a thriving textile industry and a largely Protestant population. By the two Silesian Wars of 1740-42 and 1744-45 Frederick obtained about two-thirds of it, reluctantly ceded after Frederick's troops had penetrated into Bohemia and Moravia. Frederick gained over a million new subjects, most of them apparently quite satisfied with the change. The Silesian campaigns had not been a complete walkover, Maria Theresa had already set about reforming her administration and her army, but they established Frederick and his army as a force to be reckoned with, not only in numbers but in tactics and training. Ten years of peace after 1745 gave Frederick time to learn the lessons of the Silesian campaigns, and to increase his army to over 133,000 men. By the time that Bräker was learning "all that the god Mars teaches" in 1756, however, rumours of another war had reached even the lower ranks.

The Prussian army had originally been a peasant militia, but this system had been abandoned because the landowners were reluctant to allow the peasants access to weapons, and because it took too much labour away from working the land. By 1756 native Prussians were recruited by each individual regiment from its designated catchment area; all physically fit young men were