334 FREDERICK AND WAR
stupid blunders, the most incredible improbabilities. (Guibert,- II. 170)
The Prussian officers, so prompt to sacrifice life, health and
liberty at royal behest, nevertheless retained a sense of individual
dignity and corporate worth that was not at the king's command. In
the Seven Years War it strengthened them in their collective refusal
to carry out what, by twentieth-century standards, was the very
unatrocious atrocity of devastating royal palaces in Saxony. Every
officer in the regular army whom Frederick directed to carry out the
deed refused the commission outright and was willing to take the
consequences. Saldern declared: 'Your Majesty may send me to
attack the enemy batteries, and I will readily obey. But to act
contrary to my honour, oath and duty is something which my will
and conscience do not permit me to do' (Kiister, 1793, 42). To men
like these, loyalty to the king was part of their code of obligations, but
not the totality. 'Honour' was a commodity they carried about with
them, and not something they consigned to the keeping of another.
Here was an essential difference in the ethos of a Frederician officer
from that of the SS, to whom honour and loyalty were the same thing
- 'Meine Ehre heisst Treue'.
Saldern was able to resume his successful career, after a long
period of disfavour, but there was no such reprieve for the defenceless
Lieutenant-Colonel Johann Friedrich von der Marwitz, who was
forced to leave the army. Marwitz lived out the rest of his days in
retirement, but he never regretted that he had withstood the king,
and his tombstone bore an epitaph of his own composition which
clarified the principle for posterity:
He chose Disgrace, when Obedience was incompatible with
Honour. (Augstein, 1968, 93)Almost every study of Frederick tells us about the artificial constitu-
tion of the Prussian army of his time, and the repressive treatment of
the rank and file. Certainly there was an element of contrivance in a
system which maintained a standing army of 160,000 troops from a
base of 4,500,000 souls. This force was the equivalent in absolute
terms of the British Army of the early 1980s, and it was twelve times
greater in proportion to the size of the population.
Frederick's achievement was made possible by the expedient of
recruiting one-third or more of the establishment from foreign merce-
naries. Experience showed that half of these men would run off as
soon as they could, and the consequence was an unremitting rigour of
supervision, reinforced by the threat of the gauntlet and other terrible
punishments.