The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Read Online Free PDF Page A

tidings. Frederick wrote to him personally to thank him for his unofficial diplomatic efforts. When Frederick’s emissary to Tsar Peter arrived in St. Petersburg, Steuben stayed on as his assistant. The mission was an unqualified success. Tsar Peter made peace with Frederick, pulled his troops out of Prussia, and Frederick’s most dangerous enemy was out of the war for good. With Russia gone, Austria and France could not keep up their war against Prussia for very long. The peace was a godsend for Prussia. And it worked out well for Steuben, too. He had exchanged several letters with the king himself and had played a personal role in saving Prussia from what seemed at the time to be certain destruction. When he returned to Prussia in May 1762, the king received him in person. It is hard to imagine a more fortuitous turn of events for an ambitious junior officer. The Fates would surely favor him now. 18
    And they did…for a while. The war with Russia was over; the wars with Austria and France, drawing to a close. King Frederick had some much-needed breathing space, and to make up for the wartime loss of so many talented generals, he decided to devote some of his time to the making of new ones. He did this through the creation of a rudimentary staff school—the “Special Class on the Art of War” ( Spezialklasse der Kriegskunst )—an intensive course in generalship that he himself would teach. Thirteen students were carefully selected from the up-and-coming leaders of the army, to be schooled in the higher levels of strategic planning and army leadership. And Steuben, just recently promoted to captain, was one of them. At thirty-one, he wasbeing groomed for a general’s rank, with the greatest soldier of the age as his personal tutor.
    But something went horribly wrong. Steuben ran afoul of a classmate: as he himself put it, he had earned the “rancor” of an “implacable enemy.” Most likely Captain von Steuben was referring to General Wilhelmi von Anhalt, a jealous, vindictive, and brutal misanthrope, who for some perverse reason stood high in the king’s favor. Anhalt had gained a justly deserved reputation for wrecking the careers of officers for whom he had taken a dislike—and there were many of them. Whatever or whoever authored Steuben’s fall from grace, it happened in the blink of an eye. Steuben finished the staff school around the time the war with Austria ended, in February 1763, and found himself almost immediately demoted. He was assigned to a company command in the Infantry Regiment von Salmuth (No. 48), stationed at Wesel, on the far western edge of the kingdom, a humble post in a mediocre regiment, and at a remote location. It was clearly not a mark of royal favor. Only a couple of months later, he was dismissed from the service entirely. After residing for a while in Berlin, he left Prussia sometime before the end of 1763.
    It is still impossible to determine exactly what happened to the promising career of Captain von Steuben. He did not blame his misfortune on the king, whom he still mentioned years later with the purest reverence. It is true that the king radically pared back the size of the army upon the conclusion of peace in 1763, as a matter of economy, and so it is possible that Steuben was the victim of nothing more insidious than “downsizing.” Yet that does not seem to be a logical explanation. Even as he mused over his life during his twilight years, Steuben found the events of 1763 almost too painful to contemplate, much less to discuss in writing.
    â€œOf my service in the Seven Years’ War, I have no reason to be ashamed,” Steuben proclaimed many years later. Indeed, he could be—and was—quite proud of it. After his arrival in America more than fourteen years later, he would frequently tell his new acquaintances that he had studied war in the finest school in the world. Hedidn’t just mean the king’s