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'The Combat Ends for Lack of Combatants’
Prussian Light Infantry in the Jena Campaign
By Kevin Kiley
Bibliographical Notes
In doing research for this paper, I found the following in the bibliography
of Peter Paret’s excellent study Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform,
1807-1815 and thought it appropriate to quote here. Much has been made
of the Prussian and Austrian staff studies that were completed before
World War I. They are excellent and full of useful information, as
many have attested, especially Paret. As an aside, I am currently in
the process of obtaining one of General Jany’s volumes, his works being
cited by many, Craig and Paret in particular, as being useful in any
study of the Prussian Army. However, it should be noted that they are
secondary sources, almost one hundred years old, and definitely a product
of their times.
‘The official documents can be placed in perspective and given their
proper value only by consulting the service correspondence, and the
eyewitness accounts, diaries, the theoretical and practical discussions
that the soldiers of the period produced so copiously. Some of this
material was ignored and much of the rest was cavalierly misinterpreted
when, after the founding of the Second Empire, the Historical Section
of the German General staff set itself the task of writing the history
of Prussia’s wars in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
As a collection of sources on all aspects of the Prussian military
establishment these studies are indispensable. But their analyses
imposed on the conditions of an earlier age the strategic and organizational
concepts that the army had learned, often with difficulty and recalcitrance,
from Molltke during the Wars of Unification. The profoundly unhistorical
spirit that too often informed their work is exemplified by a volume
of Frederick’s military writings prepared by the Chief of the Historical
Section, General Adalbert von taysen, in which were carefully indicated
those parts that the editor considered still valid in the age of the
railroad, the telegraph, and the Krupp gun. Max von Szcvepandki’s
judgment on the three volumes dealing with the Prussian army of 1812
and the Wars of Liberation, holds true for many other publications
of the Kriegsgeschichtliche Abteilung. They consist, he wrote, ‘of
meritorious detailed labor, a valuable collection of sources, with
a commentary that does not go beyond the customary, the officially
desired interpretation.’ A former member of the Section, General
Jany, did not shed what Delbruck once called his Generalstabs-Auffassung
when after the First World War he came to write his unofficial four
volume Geschichte der Preussischen Armee. Here, too, a great deal
of important information is embedded in a text that rejects historical
objectivity as something unpatriotic.’
Paret also comments on the accuracy of some of the General Staff products
in
‘that the General staff historians inaccurately minimized the part
of the light infantry and its methods is also borne out by the army’s
tables of organization’
in 1813 and that
‘the evidence both of combat reports and the organization of the
army goes against the General Staff works. Held in thrall by an ‘old
Prussian’ Frederician tradition largely of their own making, the official
military historians have ignored the motives, extent, and implications
of the changes that occurred in the army, and with them passed over
an important instance of German reaction to the experience of the
French Revolution.’
Additionally, such historians of the Section as von der Goltz and
Freytag-Loringhoven
‘with all their specialized knowledge. lacked objectivity; both
put history to the service of the political and military disputes
of their age. They were Militarpolitiker, who explicitly wrote their
works as tracts for the times; political and social conservatism coupled
with aggressive patriotism and a fervent belief in large, professional,
standing armies could not but color their judgment of the revolutionary
past. Their arguments agasint the significance and importance of
the French tirailleur were taken over and developed by Jany. They
recur throughout his writings, but are most explicitly stated on pages
369-370 of the third volume of the Geschichte der Preussischen Armee.
’
This, I submit, is concrete evidence from a noted scholar of the period
that the Prussian army learned from its defeat in 1806, one of those
lessons being the importance and employment of light infantry, and those
lessons were taken from the Grande Armee.
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