246 IN SEARCH OF OLD FRITZ^246
dividing the regiments into groups, or 'inspections', and delivering
them up to the mercy of Inspectors, the first of whom he appointed in
1763.
A marked social reaction could be seen in the treatment of the
many middle-class officers who had been commissioned during the
war emergency. Frederick now evicted these people wholesale from
the army, or transferred them to the hussars, and he made up the gaps
by resorting to 'noblemen from foreign lands... who give evidence of
intelligence, ambition and a genuine inclination towards the service'
('Instruction fur die Commandeurs der Cavallerie-Regimenter', 11
May 1763, Oeuvres, XXX, 280).
There was a corresponding tactical reaction which accorded very
strangely with the huge experience which the Prussian army had
accumulated in the Seven Years War. Frederick enforced a needless
complexity of manoeuvres, and an extraordinarily high rate of infan-
try fire (up to six rounds a minute) which made a great impression on
the drill square, but which would have been impossible to sustain in
real combat (but see p. 318). When they were not on parade, the
young officers were expected to attain the higher reaches of the
military art through a diligent application to their books.
Frederick believed that his army began to attain the desirable
degree of order and precision from 1770 onwards. Significantly
enough, some commentators trace the decay of military morale to
about the same period. In the view of the old drummer Dreyer, who
had served since the days of Frederick William, the decline of the
army, already evident in the Seven Years War, was prolonged and
accentuated afterwards. This he ascribed to the complications in the
drills, and a loss of true respect for authority that he linked with 'a
hunger after the good life which gripped all classes of society, giving
rise to the excessive imbibing of coffee and spirits, to prostitution and
a decline in religion' (Dreyer, 1810, 21). Georg Heinrich von Beren-
horst, who belonged to a younger generation, nevertheless had much
the same thing to say about the harmful influence of luxury, and he
added that the new emphasis on pedantry had engendered two kinds
of officers: namely limited and practical-minded men who believed
that the new theories were altogether too difficult for them, and
young Tittle masters' who excelled in all the paperwork. 'Both sorts
neglected the essential point of their calling, which was to see to
the welfare of the common soldier, and thereby win his trust'
(Berenhorst, 1798-9, I, 130).
Meanwhile Prussomania raged unabated through military
Europe. In services like the French, Spanish and Austrian (and under
Peter III and Paul I also in the Russian) the imitation of things
Prussian extended not just to the details of what was known as das