317 FREDERICK AND WARPrussian military machine could not admit of infantrymen who
might be able to fight out of sight of their officers - the wretched free
battalions had as little in common with the loyal Croats of Maria
Theresa as they did with the accomplished riflemen of Sir John Moore
in the next generation.
Old Fritz was, however, still absolutely convinced of the value of
massed artillery, and especially the howitzers. He wrote to Prince
Henry on 11 June 1778 that the Austrians would have as many as
fifteen pieces for every one of their battalions: 'But by concentrating
our howitzers and cannon at a single point we will gain the local
superiority, and perhaps be able to beat them. The real difficulty is to
make the hole in the enemy line, but once we have done that we will
overcome the remaining obstacles soon enough' (PC 26458).
In the same war, the element of diversion was represented by
projects only slightly less ambitious than those of 1762. In place of the
rampaging of the Tartars, Frederick reposed equally unfounded hopes
in the proposed Russian invasion of Galicia, which would have drawn
considerable Austrian forces to the far north-east of their empire.
If the Prussian campaign in 1778 was feeble and unsuccessful it
was not just on account of the political limitations of the war, the
sluggishness of the military machine, or the decline in Frederick's
powers. It was also the consequence of the Austrians' grasp of
military topography and their mastery of logistics. Ironically, Joseph
and his advisers kept their troops so lavishly supplied that they ruined
their state treasury in the process, and Frederick, as he began to
suspect on 26 August, emerged as the man with the last penny in his
pocket, 'and this decided almost as much as a battle' (PC 26640).
To sum up, a body of evidence appears to indicate that
Frederick's notions on the battle underwent a continuous evolution,
and that, after the Oblique Order failed to meet the demands of the
time, he strove in his final campaigns towards two objectives. First,
to tease apart the enemy concentrations by means of a programme of
diversion, which at the higher level reached grand strategic and
political dimensions; second, to employ his massed artillery to open a
breach in a chosen sector of the hostile positions.
The Frederick who emerges is no longer the hero-king who
existed in 1757, let alone the martyr-king of 1759, but a man of
perception, and perhaps unsuspected adaptability and resource. It is
odd to find such a close approximation to some of the military
practices of Napoleon in a ruler whose views on society and the
economy were so little susceptible to change.
In the matter of minor tactics Frederick always had a firm grasp of
what was practical and essential (Guibert, 1778, 126; Toulongeon