The Cognitive
Challenge of War
Prussia 1806
by Peter Paret
Princeton, 176 pp., $22.95
It must have been an eerie Monday afternoon, on October 13, 1806. Napoleon rode through Jena, where French troops had already started looting. Hegel, in his study, was working on the last pages of his Phenomenology of Spirit. From a window the philosopher was able to spot “the Emperor” ride out of town: “Truly it is a remarkable sensation to see such an individual on horseback, raising his arm over the world and ruling it,” he later wrote to a friend. Europe was on the eve of one of the most momentous battles of its bloody history. Before sunrise on the next day, the fields still covered by mist, Bonaparte ordered an attack.
The previous Friday in Saalfeld, an advance guard under the command of Prince Louis Ferdinand, nephew of Frederick the Great, became encircled by lead units under the command of Jean Lannes, one of France’s most capable generals. The prince, bravely leading a cavalry attack to break through the French lines, lost his life and 1,700 men. Morale in Prussia’s army and its Saxon contingent began slipping. The Duke of Brunswick, who faced up to Napoleon, assembled the bulk of his 161,000 troops 140 miles south of Berlin, by Weimar, Goethe’s hometown, and Jena.
In 1806 the Grande Armée was at its apex, mature and supple, not yet worn. Prussia’s traditionalism proved self-destructive against an agile enemy fired up by patriotic fervor. German officers, for example, wore braised hats, sometimes with plumes, and distinctive dress—and thus neatly marked the best targets for French marksmen. When the Prince of Hohenlohe, a hapless Prussian commander, urgently needed reinforcements after Napoleon’s attack at Jena, Ernst von Rüchel, a Prussian general of the old mold, did not rush his reinforcements into battle but orderly marched them in step, aligned, “as on parade,” one witness recorded. Clausewitz, who knew Rüchel well, quipped that the general—whom he called “concentrated acid of pure Prussianism”—trusted that Frederician tactics could “overcome anything that had emerged from the unsoldierly Revolution.” How wrong he was. Prussia lost tens of thousands of men, together with its glory as a formidable military power.
“No one,” Hegel jotted down, “imagined war as we have seen it.”
Prussia’s reaction to what could not be imagined, the shock of 1806, is the subject of The Cognitive Challenge of War. In what turned out to be a spectacularly productive quest, Germany’s greatest minds—among them artists, writers, and military intellectuals—went to work and wrestled with the consequences of France’s revolutionary wars. Paret is at his best when he deciphers some of the paintings and engravings that depict the battle. Perhaps the most impressive is Caspar David Friedrich’s The Chasseur in the Forest. It is an elaborate allusion to Prussia’s defeat. On a narrow opening framed by a stand of firs, a chasseur à cheval, his horse and strength vanished, walks slowly into the dark forest. Watching is a raven on a tree stump, symbols of death.
“The man alone on alien, immeasurable ground, which may hide unseen dangers, will meet death,” Paret writes. Geht seinem Tod entgegen is the German expression re-created by Friedrich. Contemporary opinion was in no doubt about the painting’s meaning, although not all appreciated it. Goethe, whose house had been ransacked by French troops in that October of 1806, dismissively called it “new-German-religious-patriotic art.”
Another artistic milestone is Wallenstein, Friedrich Schiller’s trilogy on the Thirty Years’ War. Schiller had served as a regimental physician in the army of Württemberg in the early 1780s, but deserted to dedicate himself to writing. The revolutionary government in Paris had even awarded him honorary citizenship. In 1794 he began writing a trilogy on Albrecht Wallenstein, a Bohemian noble who rose to fame as a capable commander. Although Wallenstein had been assassinated nearly two centuries earlier, Schiller was writing contemporary drama as well as a historical one, Goethe noted. Wallenstein, like Napoleon, was a minor noble, energetic, brilliant, who also fought war “in a new way” and was seen as a threat to the established order.
