IN SEARCH OF OLD FRITZ 245state revenues came directly from the produce of the royal domains.
Frederick's quirkiness was, however, most evident in the R6tab-
lissement of the army. His achievement was certainly great, in the
gross material sense. By the end of 1777 the arsenals were stuffed with
140,000 muskets and 1,376 re-cast pieces of artillery, and the supply
magazines held enough cereals to sustain two armies of 70,000 men
each for two years. In 1768 Frederick raised the peace establishment
to 161,000 troops, and the annexation of West Prussia in 1772 made it
possible for him to increase this figure to some 190,000, which made
the Prussian army the third largest in Europe after Austria (297,000)
and Russia (224,000).
The character of the army had by then undergone a profound
change, which was the consequence of the strictness, amounting
almost to contempt and hatred, which Frederick displayed towards
his officers and men. Frederick believed that only harsh measures
were capable of restoring discipline, and Curt Jany detects the work-
ing of the Seven Years War on the king's character: 'His judgments of
men became harder and more bitter, and their inner qualities became
of less interest to him' (Jany, 1903, 9). The army which had been
destroyed in the war was effectively the one he had inherited from his
father. The army of Frederick the Great, properly speaking, came into
existence only from 1763, and it was to be inferior in almost every
respect to its predecessor.
The tone of this new institution was set by the instructions for
the commanders of the regiments of cavaliy and infantry, which were
signed on 11 May 1763. Here we find the celebrated passage: 'Gener-
ally speaking the common soldier must fear his officers more than the
enemy.' In that same year of 1763 it was determined that foreign
recruits were no longer to be raised for individual companies, but
thrown into a common pool and allocated by the central military
bureaucracy. Recruiting parties therefore lost their interest in the
kind of men they were raising. The quality of the native soldier
probably also declined. A cumulatively great number of exemptions
freed many of the steadier young folk from the cantonal obligations,
and in 1780 Frederick actually established military service as one of
the punishments for crime.
No gratitude was extended to the corps of officers for its suffer-
ings in the Seven Years War. Frederick continued to exercise a
terrifying degree of personal control in the springtime reviews and the
autumn manoeuvres, and Berenhorst could write at the end of the
century: 'Everybody used to tremble under his gaze. Nowadays there
must be many veterans who start from their sleep, whenever this
vision appears in their dreams' (Berenhorst, 1798-9,1, 126). Indirect-
ly, Frederick enforced discipline and uniformity of standards by