218 Chapter Sixsary to collect topographical and other intelligence, to study what had
been done well or badly in campaigns of former times, and to
criticize tactics and strategy as simulated in peacetime maneuvers. The
staff officers thus became a kind of collective brain for the Prussian
army, seeking systematically to apply reason and calculation to all
aspects of army administration and operations. Links with regular
units and troop commanders were assured by the practice of attaching
members of the General Staff to every general headquarters, where
they were expected to use their specialized knowledge of technical
and logistical matters to advise the commander about how best to
implement his will.
The rewards for collaboration between trained expertise and a res
olute commander had been amply demonstrated in 1813–15. For
General Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher (1742–1819), a man of the
old Prussian school, found first in Scharnhorst (until his death from a
wound in 1813) and then in Scharnhorst’s close collaborator, August
Count Niethardt von Gneisenau (1760–1831), a chief of staff who
could translate his intentions into detailed operational orders that
foresaw and forestalled many of the factors which would otherwise
have made punctual obedience impossible. Knowing ahead of time
from maps what local topography was like, a competent staff officer
could calculate from past experience and codified rules of thumb what
rate of march a baggage train, artillery park, or infantry unit could
sustain across the terrain in question. This allowed him to foretell
what length of time would be required to complete the movements to
be performed. When to start each unit off on its march and which lines
of advance to follow could then be specified with such exactness that
the field commander could exercise far greater real control over his
troops than was possible without such staff work.
Blücher, more than most other Prussian commanders, recognized
this fact and came to respect and depend on the expertise around him
in a way that Napoleon and other generals of the era were not pre
pared to do. Blücher s relationship to Scharnhorst and Gneisenau
continued to affect Prussian military practice in the years after 1815,
though the prestige of staff officers was not completely secure until
after midcentury, when Helmut von Moltke (1800–91) showed in the
Austro-Prussian war of 1866 precisely how General Staff planners
could speed up and control strategic deployment of vast numbers of
men by calculating everything carefully ahead of time.
The Prussians also preserved the ideal of universal military obliga
tion into peacetime. This was partly because of the emotional residue