The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (24 page)

Steuben's biggest headache was one largely of his own making: the emptiness of his wallet. Money problems had haunted him since the day he left the Prussian army; one gets the impression from his correspondence that he thought of little else. As a major general, his monthly pay was $166.67 in Continental scrip, which, thanks to rampant inflation, was worth no more than around $20 in gold. Maybe there wasn't much purchasing power in that salary, but then, Steuben did not have to pay for his meals—he received fifteen rations per day on account of his rank, while the members of his staff drew between three and five
rations daily. Together, they could feed themselves quite well, and often they dined at the Peters' table anyway.

But the Baron was no good at managing his money. He was not greedy, for he spent lavishly on his friends and frequently lent huge sums to help his junior staff members when they were down on their luck. Yet money flowed through his hands like water. His taste for expensive clothes did not help. One time he purchased eight plumes and twelve cockades—hat ornaments, in other words, hardly necessities—from a Philadelphia tailor for the princely sum of $2,200, more than thirteen times his monthly pay! It was fortunate that he had such a good friend in Richard Peters. Peters lobbied Congress on his behalf, making the perverse claim that Steuben—who “appears to be frugal and moderate in his expences”—could not be expected to support himself on the money he could draw from his (imaginary) European incomes. At Peters's urging, Congress granted Steuben an additional $84 per month to cover his expenses as inspector.
³⁸

None of these matters was a serious interruption of the Baron's grand work. He had set an ambitious schedule for himself and his staff, for he wanted to have the regulations finished, approved, printed, and ready for distribution to the army in time for training in the spring. He wasn't too far off. The first half of the regulations was finished in February 1779. He submitted the second and more substantial half, the regulations for military conduct and administration, to Washington on March 5. Three weeks later, having addressed Washington's concerns and revised the text, the Baron tendered the completed manuscript to Congress for final approval. Congress gave the book its imprimatur, and Steuben its thanks, on March 29, 1779, ordering that the regulations be printed immediately. After four long years of fighting the British, the Continental Army finally had a standardized military code.
³⁹

 

S
TEUBEN'S MAGNUM OPUS
bore the inelegant title
Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States
, but in common parlance it soon acquired another name, derived from the color of the
pasteboard covers used for the 1779 edition: the Blue Book. The production standards were perhaps a bit crude, but the contents were pure gold. Many military manuals had been published in the colonies prior to the war, or during the early years. Timothy Pickering, Washington's adjutant general and one of Steuben's allies on the Board of War, had himself written one of the best. But none of them could compare with Steuben's in depth, concision, or originality. In a mere 150 pages of text and plates, the Baron had created one of the most significant and enduring documents in American military history.

The Blue Book's many chapters form three distinct and very different parts: a drill manual for the infantry, a set of official regulations for the use of the entire army, and a treatise on the conduct of officers and enlisted men. The drill manual is the most famous part, the portion of the Blue Book most commonly associated with the Baron's name. For its time and genre, it was uncommonly straightforward, easily grasped by officers with the most rudimentary literary skills.

The soldiers at Valley Forge commonly referred to Steuben's tactical lessons as “the Prussian exercise”—not that they had any way of knowing that the drill they were learning was Prussian, but they knew that the Baron was, and so it was an easy assumption to make. Steuben, offhandedly and partly tongue in cheek, labelled his “discipline” in the same fashion. “My good republicans wanted everything in the English style; our great and good allies everything according to the French fashion,” he told a former Prussian comrade after the war. “And when I presented a plate of sauerkraut
à la prussienne
, they all came together to throw it out of the window. Nevertheless, by the force of proving by
God-dam
that my cookery was the best, I overcame the prejudices of the former; but the second liked me as little in the forests of America as they did on the plains of Rossbach.”
⁴⁰

The style of Steuben's “plate of sauerkraut” was Prussian, but in nearly every other respect it definitely was not. The drill with which most Continental soldiers were already familiar—the British manual of 1764 and books based upon it—was much closer to what Prussian soldiers learned than the Baron's drill was. In the Seven Years' War, the
army of Frederick the Great had performed remarkably well against incredible odds, and nothing inspires imitation like success. Since the secret to Prussian excellence seemed to come from discipline, it was only natural to assume that drill held the key. The British army was no exception; much of British drill was based on its Prussian counterpart.

Steuben did not copy the Prussian drill, or even adapt it. Rather, what he did was to incorporate the most important things about the way the Prussians fought—emphasizing firepower and speed of maneuver—and ideas from other tactical manuals into a cogent whole, while stripping it of all unnecessary ephemera, so it could be taught quickly and painlessly to amateur soldiers.

“I have rejected every thing which tended only to Parade,” he explained to Congress, “and confined myself to what alone appeared to me absolutely necessary.”
⁴¹
The “manual exercise,” though the least important part of the regulations, clearly showed the Baron's commonsense approach. A good example is the command “Order…FIRELOCK!”—the simple act of carrying a musket from its upright position at the left shoulder down to the right side, so that the butt of the musket rested on the ground near the right foot. In British and Prussian drill, this command was executed with needless complexity. It took six distinct motions.
*
Certainly it looked impressive when done correctly and in unison by a whole battalion of crack troops, but was it
necessary
? Steuben didn't think it was, and so he reduced the process from six motions to two: one to seize hold of the musket with the right hand, one to carry the musket to the right side and plant it on the ground. No superfluous flourishings of the musket, no pointless movements of the feet. It illustrated one of the primary tenets of Steuben's gospel: keep it simple. In the Blue Book, form took a backseat to function.

Infantry battalion deploying from column to line of battle by Guibert's method, from
Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States
(Philadelphia, 1779).

The most important elements of that function, though, were to be found farther along in the drill manual. Again, Steuben steadfastly refused to be constrained by the narrow horizons of his Prussian experience. In the Prussian infantry, columns deployed into line, and shifted back into column, through a process of wheeling: individual smaller units, like platoons within a battalion, would wheel ninety degrees in the same direction to form a line from a column, or vice versa. It worked well enough with highly trained troops, but even then it was cumbersome and time-consuming. A brilliant French tactician, the Comte de Guibert, proposed a much improved method in the early 1770s. In Guibert's system, individual subunits arranged in a column would simply face to the right or left without wheeling, and march obliquely, one behind the other, in order to make the line. The method was far more efficient and faster than wheeling, and more flexible, too (see Figure 2).

An army trained in Guibert's method of deployment could also—with relatively little training—change formation during battle as required, and not just into lines or marching columns. It could form assault columns, called “columns closed in mass,” which were broader
and shallower than marching columns but deeper than lines of battle, useful for short-range, rapid bayonet charges. Guibert's system retained the firepower of traditional linear tactics while allowing a tactical flexibility that went beyond the capabilities of the Prussian army at its height. Guibert's ideas were radical; even the French army rejected them initially, and did not adopt any of them until 1791. Yet in 1779, Steuben adopted these very same ideas for the Continental Army.
⁴²

The remainder of the tactical portion of the Blue Book gave basic instructions for dealing with different kinds of terrain while on the march or in battle: how to pass safely through a narrow defile, how to march across an open plain in the presence of enemy cavalry, and so forth. To experienced commanders, such procedures might not have required explanation, but then, Steuben was not writing for them. His intent was to provide novice commanders with a time-tested set of tactical instructions. By ensuring that all commanders would approach similar problems in the same way, little was left to chance.

The second part of the Blue Book, the regulations for military conduct, was not quite so pathbreaking but was equally vital. Here Steuben set forth basic procedures for the daily administration of the army: how to conduct a court-martial or inspect troops, what kinds of records all officers should keep, how public property was to be accounted for. Other sections addressed the safety and well-being of the troops. The Baron gave explicit directions on the manner in which regimental camps were to be laid out. He knew from experience that raw troops were lazy in matters of hygiene and sanitation, that untrained men were often inclined to eat inside their tents and to urinate or relieve their bowels immediately outside. This was why infectious diseases like smallpox and measles spread like wildfire through the ranks. That could not be tolerated. Officers and men alike would have to avail themselves of specially constructed “sinks”—pit latrines—for their bodily functions. Livestock would have to be slaughtered in designated butchering areas, and the offal appropriately disposed of some distance from the camp. Every activity had its place, each man his specific duty.

The improper execution of guard duty was one of the Baron's pet peeves, and so it received a single large chapter all to itself in the Blue Book. All the details of regimental guards were included: how and where guards should be placed, how passwords and countersigns were to be given, how officers should make their “grand rounds” to test their guards' vigilance.

Steuben devoted the last third of his book to a more philosophical purpose: to clarify the duties of all ranks in the army, and to imbue officers with a sense of the nobility of their calling. Despite the fearsome reputation of Prussian officers as brutal martinets, the Baron insisted that the secret to successful leadership was not fear but love. He could never forget the image of his men digging trenches through that churchyard in Breslau on a sweltering June day, the stench oppressing them as they toiled in the foul earth, or the overwhelming sense of concern and responsibility for their welfare that he felt as their lieutenant.

There was something paternal about Steuben's vision of officer-ship. The ideal officer was an ideal father, as measured in that era: stern, certain to punish when disobeyed, but patient, protective, and caring toward his “children.” He was not their friend and should never get too close to them, yet neither could he treat them with contempt or arbitrary severity. And he must share in their privations. This is the predominant theme in the final portion of the Blue Book. “The preservation of the soldiers health should be [the] first and greatest care” of regimental commanders. For a captain commanding a company, “His first object should be, to gain the love of his men, by treating them with every possible kindness and humanity.”

The tome was not as complete as Steuben would have liked—it did not, for example, include brigade or divisional maneuvers—yet it was a remarkable achievement in that its significance went way beyond its intended primary function. It imposed order on an army that had very little order. It introduced the very latest in European tactical thought, some of which would not be tested in Europe until the armies of Revolutionary France swept away the detritus of the ancien régime and
ushered in a new era in the history of warfare. And by establishing common procedure and a common professional ethos, it imparted uniformity. It made it possible for the Continental Army to be something other than a collection of small state armies under one command—to be
the
army of the United States, the only institution that brought together common folk from all of the states to work toward a common purpose.