Stefan Kroll. Soldaten im 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Friedensalltag und Kriegserfahrung: Lebenswelten und Kultur in der kursächsischen Armee 1728-1796. Krieg in der Geschichte. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2006. 654 pp. EUR 88.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-506-72922-4.

Reviewed by Brian G.H. Ditcham (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

The Saxon Soldier in War and Peace

The paintings of townscapes in mid-eighteenth-century Saxony by the Venetian artist Bernardo Bellotto are justly renowned. Their almost photographically precise nature appears to offer the modern viewer a window into a bygone world inhabited by a population going about its daily business among the buildings and streetscapes that were the artist's main concern. Close inspection of this population reveals figures in uniform, whether standing guard in sentry boxes outside palaces and government buildings or simply part of the bustle of the streets. Stefan Kroll's substantial work seeks to bring these figures, the men of the Saxon army, into the foreground and examine their experiences in times of peace and war. Kroll's focus falls clearly on the "other ranks" of the army, the noncommissioned officers and men who accounted for the vast majority of its membership. The experience of the Saxon officer is largely absent, though Kroll does explore Saxon participation in what one might call the "military Enlightenment" of the late eighteenth century, which was very much a matter for the officer class. Kroll does, however, include the wives and children of the men in the ranks within his study, which adds considerably to its depth.  

The study is based on thorough archival research. Perhaps surprisingly given the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, the administrative records of the eighteenth-century Saxon army have survived largely intact (unlike their Prussian equivalents). This means, for instance, that complete series of monthly regimental muster rolls survive, at least for the later eighteenth century. On the other hand, relatively few "voices from the ranks" are available in the shape of surviving letters, diaries, or memoirs for Kroll to work with. The most significant surviving source of this nature is the rather engaging autobiography of Friedrich Christian Sohr, who held the rank of "Fourier" (a cross between quartermaster and regimental scribe) in a Saxon cavalry regiment during the late 1770s. Sohr was not the stuff of which heroes are made--in addition to fearing the enemy, he admits to dreading forests and the hours of darkness as well as to drinking too much while on campaign--and it comes as little surprise that he deserted from the army only to find life in Viennese exile equally difficult.

The core of the book is composed by two lengthy chapters on military life in times of peace and war, sandwiched between almost equally lengthy studies of recruitment to and desertion from the Saxon army. Kroll's painstaking engagement with apparently arid administrative records can have fascinating results. Detailed analysis of regimental marriage records, for instance, reveals that the majority of soldiers' wives came from thoroughly respectable artisan backgrounds; a strong implication emerges that marriage represented a stage on the way to the husband's long-term integration into the urban artisan class after his soldiering days were done. Since only a limited number of soldiers could obtain permission to marry at any one time, formal marriage might be preceded by a lengthy relationship and the birth of one or more children. Examination of muster rolls before and during the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778-79) permits the establishment of desertion patterns on a month-by-month basis. Unsurprisingly, the relatively low levels of desertion normal to the peacetime Saxon army increased substantially with the coming of war (Sohr was one of the deserters). More unexpectedly, a brief "spike" of desertions by married men with long years of service occurred in the Saxon ranks as the army moved to a war footing. Kroll suggests that this effect reflects concern about the material well-being of their families in a situation where they would no longer be able to supplement low basic pay by their normal artisanal activities, coupled with an understandable--if ultimately mistaken--belief that an amnesty for deserters would be forthcoming in a matter of months. This interpretation sounds plausible, though one might add that the Saxon army of 1778 had not heard a shot fired in anger for some fifteen years and only a small minority of even long-serving soldiers would ever have faced the rigors of campaigning.

The general picture of the Saxon army that emerges from Kroll's account is of an increasingly "old-fashioned" force. The army was overwhelmingly native-born in composition and substantial sectors of the population were in principle exempt from compulsory recruitment should the number of volunteers fall short of requirements. Short-lived experiments with local militia service were abandoned after the Seven Years War. Conscription on something like the Prussian cantonal model was only introduced in 1781, troops were still being billeted on the civilian population in the 1790s, and there was no standing peacetime corps of field chaplains or university-trained army doctors. Pay remained stuck at the levels of the 1720s. As a result, peacetime military service, even in a nominally standing army, had a distinctly part-time air. The full regimental strength was only expected to be on hand for two or three months in the early summer, when annual exercises took place; for the rest of the year, leaves of absence were readily granted, which allowed soldiers to earn their living in urban craft occupations or on family farms.

Kroll's study presents a further challenge to stereotypes of eighteenth-century German soldiers as brutalized figures on the margins of society and of armies of that era as mechanisms for social control. The "mixed economy" of recruitment, ranging from the recruitment of genuine volunteers to straightforward impressment by kidnapping, with a whole spectrum of situations in between, generally allowed a degree of bargaining over the length of service expected, with terms of around five years being common. It was relatively easy for men who could demonstrate their economic indispensability to gain release from the ranks, especially if they could find substitutes. The norm of part-time service limited the distance between the army and the civilian population. Even if tensions arose in urban environments over artisan soldiers outside the guild system providing goods and services and benefiting from tax privileges, in practice these were generally manageable (as the marriage evidence suggests). Kroll also argues that the army did not simply lend itself to use as a dumping ground for social misfits, apart from a brief period in the late 1720s when vagrants were rounded up and forcibly recruited, with predictable consequences for discipline. He points to cases where recruiting officers refused to accept men nominated for compulsory service by their landlords or local communities because they failed to meet the statutory physical requirements--one of the intriguing facts emerging from the muster records is that the Saxon army took its minimum height requirement seriously, with the average Saxon soldier being something like ten centimeters or around four inches taller than his British counterpart.

While generally convincing, the study does have its flaws, which in some cases are simply the consequence of its strengths. The sheer amount of detail derived from a close reading of administrative sources can be overwhelming, and at times one loses sight of the forest among the trees. Some topics are pursued in rather more detail than they merit because they are well covered in the sources. For example, Kroll includes a lengthy section on fortress building as a military punishment (even though only a tiny minority of the most serious military offenders would have been condemned to it), while the section on discipline at regimental level is rather superficial, making it impossible to judge how the Saxon army compared with other militaries in, say, its approach to flogging. At times Kroll seems a little too willing to take normative sources at face value. While the passages on the "military Enlightenment" of the late eighteenth century and the associated positive revaluation of the common soldier in the 1790s are interesting, it is less clear how far (if at all) they led to changes in practice at regimental level. The account also makes some surprising omissions--for instance, the author does not examine how recruitment worked in practice after the 1781 reforms, though it is at least possible that there might be links between the introduction of conscription and the shifting elite attitudes to the common soldier he identifies. Finally, it must be mentioned that Kroll (like the military bureaucrats upon whose papers he is so heavily reliant?) appears to be more comfortable with the relatively orderly world of peacetime armies than with the more chaotic situation of wartime. While his focus on logistical problems and the experience of small-unit actions in time of war is reasonable enough, and (given the reality of the specific Saxon experience) a lengthy section on the fate of prisoners of war is unavoidable, the experience of battle or of long-term siege warfare gets rather shorter shrift than it merits. Perhaps this results from the shortage of "voices from the ranks" mentioned above; Kroll does his best with sources like evidence given by escaped prisoners of war to an inquiry into the conduct of the Saxon army at the battle of Hohenfriedenburg (June 4, 1745) but coverage remains rather thin.

Arguably, the truly unique feature of the Saxon military experience in the eighteenth century was the fate of the Saxon army at the beginning of the Seven Years War in 1756, when virtually its entire strength was trapped in the fortress of Pirna by the opening Prussian offensive and ultimately obliged to capitulate. The Saxon regiments were then more or less forcibly transferred to Prussian service, while the male population of Saxony became subject to recruitment into the Prussian army. Kroll deals with the subsequent fate of the captured Saxon regiments at some length. They were plagued by desertions and eventually whole units defected from the Prussian forces to fight their way to Poland. A "Saxon Corps" was formed to fight against Prussia's allies in western Germany as part of a predominantly French army--and promptly mutinied because they wanted to fight the Prussians on Saxon soil. Kroll examines these developments in some detail and reaches interesting conclusions about military loyalty to the ruling Wettin dynasty and to the Saxon state as well as regarding the failure of Prussian propaganda to persuade the Saxon populace that Prussia represented a Protestant cause that trumped local Saxon loyalties. He has relatively little to say, however, about the reconstruction of the Saxon army after the Peace of Hubertusberg in 1763. The new Saxon army was based on units that had escaped the investment of Pirna to link up with the Austrian forces, and on the "Saxon Corps." But what happened to prewar Saxon soldiers who had remained in the Prussian ranks--and indeed to the Saxons who had been pressed into Prussian service during the occupation? Did men with those backgrounds try to join the new army and, if so, what was their fate? Did tensions arise in the new Saxon army over, say, the recognition of promotions gained under French or Austrian command? How was the experience of operating as exile units under foreign control  incorporated into the way unit memory was constructed in the post-Hubertusberg years? (Kroll suggests that regiments did derive battle honors from this period, but is disappointingly brief on the topic.) More modern experiences illustrate the complexities of reestablishing armies in the aftermath of major military disasters, and it would have been interesting to know more about how this process was managed in post-1763 Saxony.

In terms of pure power politics, the history of Saxony in the eighteenth century is one of failure. Around 1700, Saxony was arguably a more credible contender for great power status than Brandenburg-Prussia. It was better endowed with agricultural lands, mineral resources, and nascent industrial development. Its ruler had been elected king of Poland, still regarded as a major power at that date. By 1770 or so, however, it was clear that Saxony was fated to remain a modest minor power, a significant part of the "Third Germany" but of limited importance to the world of high European politics. What went wrong? Was this basically a military failure? Apart from Frederick Augustus I (Augustus I of Poland, "Augustus the Strong" in popular parlance) few of the ruling dynasty had much interest in or aptitude for military affairs. The personal union with Poland seems to have had made little impact on the Saxon army, apart from the appearance of a few colorful (in every sense of the word) light cavalry units in the 1730s and 1740s. The impression one derives from Kroll's work is of a rather inward-looking, conservative military establishment, keen on keeping the paperwork in good order but content with an army of part-time soldiers who may have looked good on the parade ground but performed erratically in the field. Judging the fairness of this assessment goes well beyond Kroll's stated remit, but it would have been interesting to have read his views on the big picture. 

It would be unfair, however, to end on too negative a note. Kroll has provided a richly detailed study of life in the army of a medium-sized German state during the eighteenth century that contributes much to our understanding of social and military history in that era precisely because it shifts the focus away from the Prussian and Austrian experiences.   

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Citation: Brian G.H. Ditcham. Review of Kroll, Stefan, Soldaten im 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Friedensalltag und Kriegserfahrung: Lebenswelten und Kultur in der kursächsischen Armee 1728-1796. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23837

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