Instructions for His Generals

Summary

Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret. It is neither a theory of war nor a memoir but a working manual: some thirty short articles in which the king tells his commanders what he has learned at Mollwitz, Chotusitz, Hohenfriedberg and Soor, often in the first person. Frederick begins with the Prussian army itself. Its discipline, drill and rapid musketry are its strengths; its weakness is that a large part of the rank and file are foreigners or unwilling conscripts who will desert at the first opportunity. Much of the book is therefore about preventing desertion: camp sites away from woods, patrols and pickets, marches by day, no foraging without officers, and a discipline in which soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy. A series of articles follows on supply: field bakeries and magazines, the provision of bread, the management of sutlers and the sale of beer and brandy, forage for horses, and the principle that an army's operations are tied to its magazines. Frederick then treats knowledge of the country and the coup d'oeil, the trained eye that reads terrain at a glance; the choice and fortification of camps; detachments, which he warns against multiplying; spies of several kinds; marches, river crossings and the defence of rivers; and stratagems for deceiving the enemy about one's intentions. Several articles address battle. Frederick prefers short, decisive wars because Prussia cannot afford long ones, recommends attack, and describes how to engage one wing of the enemy with a strengthened wing of one's own while refusing the other, the germ of the oblique order he later used at Leuthen in 1757. He discusses the risks of battle, the role of chance, the folly of councils of war that produce only caution, and the conduct of winter quarters and winter campaigns. The text closes with a sketch of the talents a general must have, combining the boldness to seize opportunity with the patience to husband an irreplaceable army. Read now, the Instructions show an absolutist state treating war as administration, its soldiers as instruments to be fed, watched and driven, and its king as a commander who openly admits his early mistakes.

Top Lessons

• Logistics decides what strategy can attempt

  Frederick ties every operation to bread, ovens, magazines and forage. The Instructions show that an army's reach is set by how far it can be fed, a lesson later commanders repeated in their own terms.

• Discipline built on mistrust

  Because many soldiers would desert if they could, Frederick designs camps, marches and patrols around preventing escape. The book reveals how an absolutist army treated its own men as a population to be guarded.

• Concentrate rather than disperse

  Frederick repeatedly warns against detachments that weaken the main army in an effort to protect everything. The principle of concentration of force is stated here in practical terms decades before it became a doctrine.

• A commander who learns from his own errors

  The king writes frankly about mistakes, including the confusion of his first battle. The Instructions model a leader who converts experience into rules for subordinates rather than into legend.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Instructions are a document of the eighteenth-century military body: how much bread a soldier needs, how far he can march, how sutlers' beer and brandy should be regulated, how camps are sited, and how fear is managed by discipline. Desertion, which Frederick treats as a security problem, also reflects homesickness, exhaustion and dread, conditions later military medicine would name (nostalgia was already a recognised diagnosis among Swiss mercenaries from Johannes Hofer's 1688 dissertation). Frederick says little directly about field surgery or hospitals in this text; his later reforms of the Prussian military medical service belong to other documents. The absence is itself telling for a history-of-medicine reader: the wounded appear chiefly as losses of strength to be avoided by short wars.

• Opening articles on the Prussian troops

  Measures to prevent desertion, revealing the coercive conditions and low morale of many soldiers.

• Articles on subsistence and sutlers

  Bread supply, field bakeries and the regulated sale of beer and brandy to troops.

• Articles on camps

  Choice of camp sites for water, wood and defensibility, and arrangements that also bear on sanitation and the health of an army at rest.

• Articles on battle and on winter campaigns

  Losses in attack, the case for short wars, and the strain of winter operations on men and horses.