ORIGINS 13Frederick William in his eternal debt by shepherding him on the
campaign in Brabant. Prince Leopold was made field-marshal in 1712,
and in the following year, as effective chief of staff to the new king, he
began to re-work the Prussian army in his own image. Now the
officers discovered that they were expected to make military duties
their first concern in life, even in peacetime, which was something of
a novelty in contemporary Europe.
Prince Leopold wrote compulsively on military affairs. He tore
up his manuscript history of the army in a fit of rage, but his
historically based Stammliste was accepted for nearly a century to
come as the definitive text on the lineage of Prussian regiments. He
was probably also responsible for expanding Frederick's grasp of the
technicalities of warfare. Until the later 1730s Frederick's military
education had been oddly thin. His scratchy sketch maps have a
vigour of their own, but he never learnt to draw as well as most of his
contemporaries, and he showed a positive disinclination towards the
subjects of mathematics and geometry, which were then considered
the foundations of military training.
The Old Dessauer was an expert in the formation of crown
princes, and for the instruction of Frederick he compiled a Clear and
Detailed Description, which was based on the orders of the day which
were issued in the campaigns against the Swedes between 1715 and
- The text was illustrated by a set of sixteen huge plans, and this
mass of paper was bestowed on Frederick in January 1738.
The Old Dessauer's communications with Frederick, as crown
prince and later king, remained elaborate and deferential. To the
other military men Prince Leopold addressed himself with a violence
that was accepted as part of his style. This self-consciously tough and
altpreussisch way of Dessau soldiering was perpetuated by Leopold's
s$ns and nephews, and by proteges and admirers like the colonels
Friedrich von Manstein and Hermann von Wartensleben, and the
generals Winterfeldt and Fouqu6.
Another strand in the Prussian military tradition was embodied
by Kurt Christoph von Schwerin (1684-1757), who represented one of
the ideals of Frederick's youth, and became his mentor on his first
campaign as king.
Schwerin was born in Swedish Pomerania, which brought with
it a disposition towards international adventuring, and he served in
the Dutch and Swedish employ before he entered the army of
Brandenburg-Prussia in 1720, as a battle-scarred and highly revered
major-general. Schwerin's way of life was associated with gracious
manners, a magnificence of food, wine and furnishings, an openness
to the French culture, and a willingness to cultivate the society of
agreeable civilians. Towards Frederick, Schwerin adopted the affable