Skip to content
Vestes Bellica Military history archive

Vestes Bellica

Schwertfeger, The Strategy of Frederick the Great in the Seven Years' War, Berlin 1913.

Frederick the Great as a young king. Portrait taken from: Priesdorf, Soldatisches Soldatentum, Vol. I, p. 199.
Frederick the Great as a young king. Portrait taken from: Priesdorf, Soldatisches Soldatentum, Vol. I, p. 199.

Recommended Articles

Heeressoziologie

The Prussian Army under Frederick William I (1713 - 40) - Chapter 9 - The Military Replacement System - Recruitment.

Numerous abuses are associated with recruitment at home and abroad, and the excesses connected with the intense hunt by Prussian recruiting detachments for tall recruits permanently damaged the image of the Prussian state in the eyes of contemporaries and posterity. However, the use of foreigners for army replacement was a problem for all armies of the 18th century and characteristic of the age of mercenary armies. A contemporary reports: „The recruitments both within and outside the country were under King Frederick William incessantly pursued with the utmost severity. No school was exempt from this, only the universities. As long as the student remained at the university and within its walls, he was considered in a free city. The Dessau infantry regiment was quartered in Halle, and it captured before the gates, in the villages, and sometimes even in the town at night many a student. They hurried with them to Dessau until the clamor and tumult that was sent there subsided among the students. As soon as one left the university, one was safe nowhere; even the candidates, when they traveled to ordination in Magdeburg, Stendal, Berlin, etc., were in danger of being stopped at the gate and taken away. For only the actual preachers were safe from the recruiters, but no candidate iam vocatus, nor any school servant, was safe from the recruiters. Here in Atzendorf a detachment of soldiers occupied the school at night and dragged the organist Franken from his bed and led him to Calbe. But because he had described the officer to be much larger than he actually was, the inspector Theune, who followed him, immediately brought him back from there. The Prussian officers and non-commissioned officers sent abroad for recruitment did no better. Every regiment selected for this purpose the most cunning and deceitful heads. If these could not persuade a big fellow to enlist and take the bounty, they sought by cunning and force to seize him. Nothing was too difficult for them, nothing too dangerous; they risked everything and let it come to what would happen. They broke in, dragged the big fellow from his bed, often bound and gagged him in his nightshirt, put him on a ready wagon and hurried with team horses to reach the border and our provinces“1. The abuses in domestic and foreign recruitment are also explained by the enormous performance pressure weighing on the responsible officers. The regulations of 1726 spoke clearly on this point: „If the captains recruit handsome men without complaints and acts of violence with good manners, the colonels good regiments, and the captains good companies present men in good order; then they will recommend themselves best to His Royal Majesty; on the contrary those who have bad regiments and companies will recommend themselves in the worst possible manner“.