Steuben was far too crafty to let something slip in an unguarded moment. His declarations were no accident—he wanted Washington and Congress to know. It was a form of professional damage control. A lieutenant general under Frederick the Great would have been a very high profile commander. Americans might be too parochial to know the names of Frederick’s chief generals, but not so the many foreign officers—Prussians as well as French—who served in the Continental Army. It was only a matter of time before Steuben’s fictitious past would be discovered and denounced. By tweaking the details of his story, Steuben instantly gave himself a lower profile…and a past that would be much harder to debunk than the one that Deane, Franklin, and Beaumarchais had invented for him. By “outing” himself, chalking up his “error” to misunderstanding or miscommunication, he avoided the scandal that might have ensued had he been uncloaked by a hostile rival—like Thomas Conway.
Regardless of the details, either General Washington or President Laurens could have ejected Steuben then and there. The Baron had admitted, baldly and without apology, that he had been dishonest with both men and with Congress. He did desire rank and pay after all, and his credentials had been falsified. Yet neither Washington nor Laurens so much as batted an eye over the revelation—for they had already decided that Steuben’s worth more than made up for his self-serving dishonesty.
DURING HIS FIRST THREE WEEKS at Valley Forge, Steuben was everywhere. He poked his aquiline nose into the leaky, mud-chinked log huts that served as barracks, talking briefly with individual soldiers, asking about their health, their rations, their officers, and all the minutiae of life in camp.
Staff officers rarely concerned themselves with such matters; almost never did they deign to listen to the men in the ranks. But the Baron did—to him, raised in the Prussian service, this was what good officers were supposed to do—and the men took notice of his genuine interest in their welfare. What really caught their attention, what brought them out of the near stupor into which hunger, boredom, and despair had driven them, was the Prussian’s appearance. They emerged from their huts to watch him pass, usually on horseback and always dressed in his dark blue regimental coat and cloak, carefully bedecked with the Star of Fidelity, a barrel-chested man riding tall in his saddle. He did have a sword, but more often he carried a straight, silver-headed swagger stick—called an Exerzierstock in German—which was all the fashion among Prussian officers. Azor would follow him, as would Duponceau and sometimes John Laurens or Alex Hamilton, translating Steuben’s blunt but kindly interrogations into English.
In a different century, he might have appeared comically pompous, but here he inspired dumbstruck wonder. “Never before, or since, have I had such an impression of the ancient fabled God of War as when I looked on the baron,” wrote Ashbel Green, a sixteen-year-old private who would later serve as president of the College of New Jersey and chaplain to Congress. “He seemed to me a perfect personification of Mars. The trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to favor the idea.”28
And Steuben found the men fascinating, too. He loved the attention he got from them. Most of all, he admired the resilience of the ordinary Continental soldiers. They lived in unbearable conditions and were terribly disorganized, nearly bereft of food or clothing, sometimes all but forgotten by absentee officers. Few had serviceable blankets, many were without shoes or breeches, with little more than a linen hunting frock and underdrawers to stand between their nakedness and the elements. Their rations looked bad enough on paper, but despite the Herculean efforts of the commissaries, they rarely lived up to the prescribed minimal standard. The men frequently went for days at a time without the smallest piece of salt meat or dried fish, subsisting mostly on “fire-cakes” made from flour and water. It was not an unusual sight to see groups of men boiling shoes and leather accoutrements in order to make them digestible.
The men huddled for warmth around their scattered campfires, listless eyes sunk deep in gaunt faces, staring up at Steuben as he passed by. They did not often have the energy or inclination to show him the deference to which he was accustomed, but this did not offend him. These soldiers seemed to have been abandoned by their country, and although their numbers had dwindled alarmingly, the fact that there were any men at all astounded him. As he later told one of his aides, “no European army could have been kept together under such dreadful deprivations.”29
STEUBEN HAD ALREADY FORMED a fairly accurate impression of the army, its organizational and procedural flaws and the nature of its men, when Washington gave him his first solid assignment: the Baron was to take over the training of the army.
Perhaps Lafayette was correct, that drill could be taught by any officer, but that still trivializes the task that lay ahead of the Baron de Steuben in early March 1778. He would not have to train a single regiment but, rather, scores of them simultaneously. If new recruits rendezvoused with the army in the springtime, as everyone hoped they would, then they would have to be fed into the training regimen while the process of retraining the old hands was still going on. Steuben would have to do this without the authority of a legitimate rank, and without even a decent command of the English language. And he would have no more than three months in which to accomplish this minor miracle.
A European army to fight a European war, but in America—that was what Washington wanted. Though most of the army’s leaders agreed with him, there were naysayers, too, men who thought that the best chance for winning independence was to fight a “war of posts,” a guerrilla war. American soldiers, as free men unaccustomed to deference, would never be fully capable of emulating their European counterparts. They were better suited to fighting an irregular war of raids and ambushes, avoiding outright confrontations with superior forces. They would never allow themselves to be led dumbly to the slaughter, like the poor Redcoats at Bunker Hill in 1775. Instead, by fighting a war of posts, eventually the Continentals would convince the British crown that crushing the revolt was not worth the investment in blood and treasure. And it would be infinitely less expensive for the Americans to rely on improvised militia levies than on a standing army. One did not need an army of automatons to fight King George’s slaves.
But there was much to recommend Washington’s more conventional approach. A successful war of posts required patience and stamina, qualities that the Americans generally had not exhibited. The British, moreover, were no strangers to irregular warfare. In the French and Indian War, and against the Jacobite rebels in the Scottish Highlands, they had learned a great deal about counterinsurgency tactics. If the Americans were to defeat the British, if they wanted to earn the respect of the great powers of Europe, they would have to fight the war in both ways—as a war of posts and as a conventional war.
This meant that the Continental Army would have to learn the intricacies of linear warfare, and learn them well. And this, in turn, entailed drill and lots of it. Drill was an essential ingredient in linear warfare. To the casual observer, drill may not appear to be anything more than a series of stylized movements performed in unison by a group of soldiers, a practice that has about as much a place on the modern battlefield as horses and flintlock muskets. Yet even today, drill exercises remain an important component of basic military training—and in part for the same reasons that made it so fundamental in eighteenth-century warfare. Drill instills discipline. Constant practice of repetitive motions and movements turn men into unthinking cogs in a larger military machine. It breaks down individuality, replacing the inclination to think with the instinct to obey.
In Steuben’s day, this kind of discipline was vital because there was no room in linear tactics for soldiers who thought for themselves, at least not in the line infantry. Thought was a tactical liability, for thought and emotion could induce panic in stressful situations. Once an individual soldier perceived that he was in great peril—that a hostile battalion was marching toward him, bayonets levelled at chest
height, or was about to fire a volley in his direction—he would likely seek cover or, even worse, flee. If he had a loaded musket in his hand, he might be tempted to fire it, even without being ordered to do so.
Such instincts had to be suppressed, for they were dangerous. Once panic set in, it would become infectious, and under fire, a company, a regiment, or even a larger unit would easily succumb to a herd mentality that could push reason and physical courage to the side. Once a single soldier fired off his musket without being ordered to, then “fire discipline” was compromised: the entire unit was likely to join in, and the effect of restrained volley fire at close range was lost. Once a single soldier decided that he should seek safety in flight, then others would flee, too. Even if his comrades did not decide to turn and run, their cohesion could be shattered. When an entire regiment or brigade lost the will to stand fast and fight, it became easy pickings for a determined assault, especially a headlong rush of enemy cavalry with sabres drawn.
Visceral reactions to the stresses of combat were difficult enough to suppress when casualties were light. The noise and smoke of the battlefield were sufficient to panic raw troops. But when men began to fall, when the screams of the wounded and the dying filled the air, then all bets were off. Soft lead musket balls, travelling at subsonic speeds, could cause ghastly wounds, especially at the short ranges characteristic of eighteenth-century battles. Artillery casualties were worse yet; the damage caused by solid shot—ordinary cast-iron cannonballs—to flesh and bone, even at long range, was unspeakable. A man who witnessed a comrade or filemate mangled by solid shot or torn to pieces by grapeshot or canister, or who saw the entire rank in front of him practically melt into the ground after a point-blank volley of musketry, would have to be very tough indeed not to run away in sheer terror.30
Drill did not inoculate soldiers against the horrors of the battlefield. But it helped. Troops who had been exercised on the parade ground, day in and day out, for months at a time, were more likely to respond to their officers’ commands in the heat of battle without thinking about the awful carnage all around them.
What made drill especially important for armies of the period was the intricacy of linear tactics, and two elements in particular: firepower and movement. Soldiers trained to load and fire at the same rapid rate would be much more efficient than those who were not trained as a group. They would also be more likely to fire by volley when required to do so, and could better restrain themselves from the instinct to shoot until given the command by their officers.
Discipline of movement was even more essential than fire discipline. The mere act of forming an army in line-of-battle involved a complex series of motions: first it would have to be moved to the desired deployment point in a marching column; then the individual subunits, the battalions or regiments, would have to be deployed in long lines, two or three ranks deep, facing the enemy; and finally those subunits would have to be placed alongside each other, flank meeting flank, to form a full line of battle. The process could take hours to perform. In a large but untrained force, it could well prove impossible. And that was only for initial deployment. If it became necessary to change the disposition of forces in the midst of battle to meet unanticipated threats—for example, to shift or turn a flank in order to meet an enveloping movement by the enemy—then drill made all the difference between victory and defeat. Only an army in which the men did precisely as they were told without hesitation could execute such actions.
The Continental Army in 1778 was not unfamiliar with drill. It had, in fact, experienced quite a great deal of it. The problem was that there was no uniform “system,” no standard to which all the army could be held. The absence of uniformity was a curse that pervaded almost every aspect of life in the Continental Army. Choice of a drill manual was left to the regimental commanders themselves. Without an accepted standard, colonels used whatever resources they had at hand. Frequently they relied on the current British military manual, the Regulations of 1764; others turned to drill manuals published in the colonies before the war for the use of local militia outfits. “Each Colo[nel] Exercised his Reg[imen]t according to his own Ideas, or those of any Military Author that might have fallen into his hands,” Steuben complained.31 The differences were enough to cause some confusion when units operated together in larger formations.
Nor was drill evenly practiced or enforced. Some commanders were sticklers for drill—Anthony Wayne, for example; others were all but indifferent. Commissioned officers rarely participated in the training of their men, but—following British practice—left that task to their sergeants, something Steuben found unconscionable. With so little direction from above, very few soldiers in the army had experienced drill in larger formations. Regimental drill was unusual, and drill in entire brigades or divisions all but unknown in the Continental Army.
Such was the army—if army it could be called—that was thrust upon the Baron de Steuben for training in mid-March 1778. The Baron had not drilled so much as a single company in nearly twenty years. Then he had had the advantages of time, support, an established procedure, youth…and insignificance. As a mere line officer, one among many hundreds, he had to worry only about pleasing his regimental commander. But this was an entire army. Much hinged on his performance, and all eyes were on him.
CHAPTER 5
On the Parade-Ground at Valley Forge
[MARCH–APRIL 1778]
[Steuben] is now Teaching the Most Simple Parts of the Exercise such as Positition and Marching of a Soldier in a Manner Quite different from that, they Have been heretofore used to, In my Oppinion More agreable to the Dictates of Reason & Common Sence than any Mode I have before seen.
HENRY BEEKMAN LIVINGSTON TO ROBERT R. LIVINGSTON,
MARCH 25, 17781
ON THURSDAY, March 19, the Baron de Steuben resumed the military career he had left behind some fifteen years before.
It was mid-morning, and he had already been awake for hours. He had been at his desk, working by candlelight long after sunset, and had roused himself again at 3:00 A.M. after very little sleep. The early start on the day afforded him the chance to put himself together. He was very particular about his appearance, and this was an especially important day. After his manservant Vogel dressed and powdered his long graying hair, braiding it into a tight queue as he had worn while a young lieutenant at Breslau, he still had time to put on his uniform and fuss over the details. He lit his pipe, tried to enjoy a cup of coffee—a precious luxury in the camp, but one the Baron found very difficult to live without—and reviewed the notes he had written the night before. Donning his heavy woolen cloak, he went out into the cold gray light of the winter morning, saddled and mounted his horse, and rode northeast to meet the men waiting for him on the Grand Parade.
The men, hardened veterans of Washington’s previous campaigns, were drawn up in line of battle, two ranks deep, on the frozen, packed earth of the Parade. They craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the portly German as his horse cantered toward them. Many of them had seen him as he made his rounds of the camp, not entirely sure as to who he was or what he wanted from them. Perhaps now they would find out.
The Baron, for his part, was apprehensive—and with good reason. Today he could not rely on wit and charm. It was not that he was un-prepared. He had been readying himself for the better part of a week—no, that was not quite right; he had been awaiting this moment for most of his adult life. He was an introspective man; he knew that a great deal rode on today’s events, that his new life in the New World, his chance to resurrect his failed career, would begin as soon as he set foot on the Grand Parade.
Precisely one week ago, General Washington had informed Steuben that he would be acting as inspector general, but in an unofficial capacity. Congress could not give him the rank he desired, nor could Washington nominate him for it. The commander in chief still would not risk alienating his American-born generals. He could not afford to be the author of more rancor, not when the wounds opened
by the plot against him were yet raw. And although humbled, Thomas Conway remained an obstacle, for he was still inspector general by congressional decree. There was no way that Steuben, with or without Washington’s blessing, could usurp that position without bruising a few egos in the process. There was nothing, however, to prevent Washington from using Steuben as an outside consultant of sorts.
Steuben had already been acting in this capacity for several weeks, but so far he had only been offering advice. Now he would be expected to put his ideas into action. The army needed so much repair, more than one man could possibly do in such a short period of time. The Baron focused on the army’s organizational flaws: the uneven sizes of the regiments and brigades, the almost criminal neglect of guard duty, problems that not only made the proper administration of the army a nightmare but that actually impeded its performance in the field and compromised its safety in camp. Solving the first problem would be a simple matter of reorganizing and consolidating the army’s regiments so that every one of them maintained an equal and reasonable size, but the regimental commanders would have none of it. “Everyone of them would command his own Reg[imen]t, tho’ he could have no more than 40 men under Arms,” Steuben complained.2 What he could do, and what Washington wanted him to do, was to attend to the “discipline” of the troops, retraining them in accordance with a “universal system.”
Although woefully understrength—its numbers pared back drastically by desertion and disease—the army at Valley Forge was large enough that training the entire force by late spring would be well nigh impossible for the Baron and his small band of assistants. So he suggested an eminently practical shortcut: he would train a single company of handpicked veterans, who would learn the basics of drill and maneuver directly under his tutelage. Once he felt satisfied with their progress, he would turn them loose on the rest of the army, sending them back to their respective brigades, where they would function as drill instructors. Steuben would teach teachers.
The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Page 10