The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Read Online Free PDF

Spezialklasse , but the entire range of experiences that the Prussian army had bequeathed to him. He had been an NCO, a company commander, an adjutant, a general in training, and a junior diplomat. He had trained raw recruits, led an infantry company into battle, and served on staffs at the battalion, regimental, brigade, and army levels. He had watched his men die, and in turn he had been wounded in battle twice, so he knew what it was like to fall in combat.
    But what set Steuben apart from his contemporaries was his schooling under Frederick the Great, Prince Henry, and a dozen other general officers. He had learned from the best soldiers in the world how to gather and assess intelligence, how to read and exploit terrain, how to plan marches, camps, battles, and entire campaigns. He gleaned more from his seventeen years in the Prussian military than most professional soldiers would in a lifetime. In the Seven Years’ War alone, he built up a record of professional education that none of his future comrades in the Continental Army—Horatio Gates, Charles Lee, the Baron Johann de Kalb, and Lafayette included—could match.
    But in the summer of 1763, Captain von Steuben, of course, was unaware of any future use to which his extensive education and considerable talents might be put. All he knew then was that he had given his all to the army. He had known no other world. Perhaps it would have been more merciful if he had remained a company commander all his life. Instead, he had been given a taste, just a taste, of a glorious future in the service of his king, only to have it taken away from him just at the moment when that future looked most promising. Since his paper credentials did not match his actual experience, he was just another mediocrity, just another minor officer who had been cast aside by the fortunes of war. At age thirty-three, Steuben’s life appeared to be over.

C HAPTER 2
Courtier and Supplicant
[1763–1777]
    I am a good soldier, a poor courtier and a miserable lawyer.
    S TEUBEN , J UNE 16, 1764 1
    W ITHOUT THE ARMY , Friedrich von Steuben was lost.
    The Prussian army had practically owned him from birth. It had consumed his childhood and his adolescence. As soon as he was physically able, he had joined it, for he knew no other life, and because that’s what young Prussian noblemen did. And when the army had finished with him, it spat him out ungratefully.
    When, in his declining years, Steuben recounted, for posterity and Congress, the events of his life in Europe, he downplayed his desperate condition in 1763. He had all sorts of options, he said: he could have retired to a life of ease on his estates in southwestern Germany; he could have accepted a commission in the army of Piedmont-Sardinia. He settled, instead, for the cushy life of a courtier.
    In reality, Steuben’s life followed a much different course. The truth was that he had no estates, in southwestern Germany or elsewhere; he owned nothing and had no prospects.“My adverse fate,” he once admitted in a rare unguarded moment, “forced me to leave my fatherland, my friends, and my support, and perhaps renounce them for life.” 2 He was adrift in a Europe at peace, where his calling counted for little, and he was willing to pounce on any job that his honor would permit him to take. After wandering aimlessly for the better part of a year—just how he got by is anyone’s guess—he finally found such a job: in the autumn of 1764, he took the post of court chamberlain ( Hofmarschall ) to the sovereign prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen.
    That summer, his travels took him to Wildbad, a picturesque little town nestled in the northern portion of the Black Forest, remote but highly popular with the powerful and well-to-do in southwestern Germany, who were drawn to the healing properties of its springs. Most likely, that was what drew Steuben there—not the spa itself, but its fashionable