The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (26 page)

His American friends, conversely, would never know the full details of his previous life in Europe. To his dying day, Billy North believed that the Baron really had been a lieutenant general and a wealthy landowner. Steuben was ashamed of his checkered past in Europe, and felt that his current condition in America stank of failure. He did not measure up to the goals he had set for himself, and the sad result was that he could not be truly intimate with anyone.

Steuben protected himself with an impenetrable shell of fabrications. Undoubtedly it affected his romantic life. The Baron said nothing about his loves, if indeed he had any, and therefore this murkiest aspect of his personality remains shrouded in mystery.

It has been claimed that Steuben was a homosexual. Indeed he may have been, and there is circumstantial evidence to suggest it: his friendship with Prince Henry, the accusations of pederasty at Hechingen, his undisguised affection for Walker, North, and Francy. But there is also circumstantial evidence to the contrary. While traveling
through New York near the end of his life, Steuben once dropped a miniature portrait of a beautiful young woman. His personal assistant asked him about her identity, and the Baron choked up. “She was a matchless woman,” he finally managed to say, but would speak no further about her.
¹⁰

There is little to prove one or the other. Steuben enjoyed the company of women, in social settings at least, but like many soldiers of his day he spent nearly all of his time in the exclusively male society of the army. Whether Steuben was homosexual or heterosexual, or asexual, for that matter, may never be known with any certainty. But his inability to let down his guard suggests that he may have been incapable of forming an intimate romantic bond with anyone, male or female.

 

T
HE TRAINING
of the army was not over and done with in 1779, but at least the process no longer required Steuben's daily personal attention. The Baron retrained the army in 1778; 1779 would be the year he reorganized it. That was the plan.

When he rejoined the army and set up his headquarters in the “low, rambling” house of Abraham Staats at Bound Brook—or, as Steuben wrote it, “Baum brok”—he made the transition from author-scholar to inspector general smoothly. His first task was to arrange a suitably impressive display of American martial prowess for the French ambassador, Conrad-Alexandre Gérard, who would be visiting Middlebrook at the beginning of May. The Baron was happy to do so, for he still hoped to impress the French and guarantee himself a position in King Louis's army.

On May 2, instead of a feu de joie, Gérard was treated to mock battle. Four battalions of handpicked men paraded in front of the viewing dignitaries, split into two separate columns, and marched to opposite ends of the Parade. The columns deployed, snapping smartly in seconds from column to line using the new method introduced by the Baron. The two forces took turns launching stately but brisk bayonet assaults upon one another. The austere Gérard clapped his hands
in delight as he watched the staged battle from the sidelines. He congratulated Washington and Steuben on the perfect execution of the spectacle, but said nothing more, and gave no hint to Steuben that the Baron's American exploits had been noted at Versailles.
¹¹

No matter. Steuben had much to occupy his attention. The army needed a thorough spring cleaning, so that it could look and perform at its best when the French finally arrived in force that year. The only thing holding him back was the Blue Book itself, which was not yet available in printed form. The war drained Philadelphia of skilled labor, leaving the city's printers and engravers shorthanded. “Here under the present scarcity of hands you can place no dependence on your workmen,” Timothy Pickering had explained to him. “To-day they are with you, & tomorrow on board a privateer with hopes of making their fortunes.”
¹²

Production problems dogged the book. The printer, Charles Cist, did a remarkable job considering the shortages of paper, ink, and labor; the engraver, one John Norman, did not. He botched the copper plates badly, and a replacement engraver had to be hired. And since only one bookbinder could be found to assemble the finished product, the project dragged on well into June 1779, without a single copy ready for distribution.

Peters and Pickering did their best, hounding the workmen, which was supposed to be Duponceau's job, but Duponceau was no taskmaster. Effete and unprepossessing, the secretary was incapable of intimidating anybody, let along rough-spoken Philadelphia artisans. “I have a real Esteem for Duponceau,” Peters quipped to Steuben, “but think him the worst Person you could have left here as he was unaquainted with the Customs…of our Country…. As to stimulating the Workman (for Workmen we could not get) he was of no more use than if you had left him to observe an Ecclipse without a Telescope.”
¹³

Steuben didn't care whose fault it was, or why there were problems. He was furious that such an important matter had been permitted to slide, and that for six weeks he had been compelled to dictate the
Regulations
line by line to regimental clerks so that they could be entered
into the orderly books. He lashed out without thinking, and nearly lost his two most valuable allies in Congress as a result. Without consulting either Peters or Pickering, he went over their heads, lodging a formal complaint with President John Jay that the Board of War wasn't doing its job. For once Congress acted quickly, handing the Board a stinging rebuke for a delay that was not at all its fault.
¹⁴

No sooner had he made the complaint than Steuben realized he had made a big mistake, for with Peters and Pickering lay the only chance of getting the
Regulations
finished. Almost too late, he tried to make amends. “I know I have already given you a Considerable deal of Trouble,” he wrote Pickering. He was still convinced that he was in the right—“the Board of War has hurt me considerably by the delay of the Regulations,” he blurted to Peters—but after his falling-out with Laurens he had no wish to lose any more friends. “Altho' I give to the Devil the Honorable Board of War, I still always Except my dear friend[s] Mssrs Peters & Pickering,” he tried to joke with Peters. “I beg, my dear Sir, you will make a similar distinction between the Inspector General & Baron Steuben. You may damn the first as much as you please, but pray, preserve your friendship to the Latter.”
¹⁵

Peters and Pickering
were
offended, but they also understood the Baron and let his anger pass. Peters, though, made him suffer first. Observing that the country air had not improved Steuben's temper, he jabbed at his friend,

The disagreement was soon smoothed over, the bookbinder and the new engraver caught up on their assigned work, and less than a week later the Blue Book was on its way to the army. Congress commissioned special leather-bound presentation copies for Louis XVI and Washington. Between June and August 1779, some fifteen hundred copies of the
Regulations
were printed for and distributed by the Board of War.
¹⁷

 

W
ITH OR WITHOUT THE
B
LUE
B
OOK
, Washington wanted an immediate and accurate report on the condition of the army. This was Steuben's job, not only because he was the inspector but also because he was the only officer in the army capable of doing it on such short notice.

Annoyed but undeterred by the truant
Regulations
, the Baron threw himself into the task with the same frantic energy he had displayed at Valley Forge, working late into the night each night, rising before sunup each morning. He expected no less from his assistants. In the army-wide inspections, which began in mid-May 1779, he was a regular terror, far more exacting than he had ever been. Each brigade, every single regiment, had to be inspected not annually but monthly, and since Steuben insisted on conducting the inspections himself, it was a punishing experience for him.

The inspection of a brigade would normally take up an entire day. Typically, a brigade of three or four infantry regiments—roughly one thousand to fifteen hundred men—would form up on the Parade first thing after breakfast. All of the men would form themselves in a single long rank, carrying their full marching gear: muskets, packs, and all of their impedimenta. Steuben, followed by Walker, perhaps, or Duponceau—the Baron no longer needed a translator all the time, as he was growing comfortable with English—would stride along the front of
the line from end to end, moving surprisingly fast on his stumpy legs, making an initial visual assessment of the brigade's strengths and faults. Then he would pass by a second time, now examining each and every soldier individually. He halted in front of each man, took each musket in hand, his sharp eyes searching relentlessly for rust, fouling, any trace of unsoldierly neglect. With his thick fingers, which barely protruded from the immaculate white lace of his shirt cuffs, he opened each man's cartridge box, examining the condition of the ammunition inside; he tugged at clothing, rattled canteens, and readjusted uniforms and equipment with his big rough hands. Each man had to drop his knapsack to the ground and open it so that the Baron could rifle through its contents. Any slovenliness, any missing piece of equipment, drew instant reproofs from him, but he was equally liberal with his compliments to men who presented a soldierly appearance. From time to time he interviewed soldiers picked at random. What had they received for rations? How did they prepare them? When were they last issued shoes? How often did they drill, and who led them?

The process became yet more painstaking that summer. Steuben had been horrified to learn that the army had no system to account for weapons, uniforms, or equipment issued to individual soldiers. The men could leave camp at the end of their enlistments taking their muskets and gear with them, and no one was the wiser. No wonder there was such waste! So the Baron created a system: company officers would have to keep “company books,” listing each item of government property—every coat, hat, knapsack, musket, pair of shoes, everything—issued to each soldier. Each soldier, likewise, had to keep what Steuben called a
livre du soldat
—a “soldier's book”—listing what he had been issued and when. Now when the Baron inspected a brigade, he would take the extra time to check each soldier's actual belongings against the records in his soldier's book.

Then it was the officers' turn. They had good reason to quail in the Baron's presence, for nothing escaped his eye. Individual soldier's books were checked against the company account books for accuracy; on-the-spot head counts of each company were compared to the official muster
rolls. Woe to the captain who could not account for a missing knapsack or for a soldier listed as present but not actually there, for Steuben demanded to know the whereabouts of every man and every article of clothing and equipment. Regimental and brigade officers were ultimately accountable for everything that was amiss, and Steuben did not hesitate to reprimand them for the failings of their subordinates. He interviewed surgeons, visited the sick in the regimental hospitals, and examined camps to look for signs of untidiness or disorder. Not a stone was left unturned. Overtly negligent officers were arrested on the spot.

No one, except perhaps the Baron himself, enjoyed the inspections. Many a soldier, one man recalled, felt a “trembling in [his] limbs” when confronted with “the keen eye and piercing countenance of the Baron.” Officers dreaded the possibility of a confrontation with the inspector should he happen to find a problem they might have overlooked. The Baron's staff hated the process most of all, the mind-numbing procession of red tape, the endless compilation of reports and statistics. Duponceau's chief memory of the “bloodless campaign” of 1779 was that it was “anything but pleasant…a tedious business.”
¹⁸

But the results were worth the effort. Property losses dropped significantly; morale soared, for the inspections helped to breed esprit de corps and a healthy spirit of competition among the regiments. The men wanted to look their best for the Baron and earn his praise. The officers paid much closer attention to the appearance and whereabouts of their men. Company officers bartered their own surplus rations for clothing and equipment to keep their men in fighting trim. And as with the training regimen at Valley Forge, Steuben consciously set an example for other officers to follow. If a major general could take such an interest in the condition of each individual soldier, so could they.

 

A
ND SO THE INSPECTIONS CONTINUED
throughout the summer: first in New Jersey, then in the Hudson Highlands, where Washington had relocated the army in June, and finally with Gates's army in Rhode Island. Steuben kept up with the demanding pace—indeed,
he thrived on it—and Washington rewarded him with a pleasant and relaxing assignment. The new French ambassador to the United States, Anne-César, Chevalier de la Luzerne, had just arrived in Boston that summer; the general-in-chief delegated Steuben to escort Luzerne from Boston to army headquarters in the Hudson Valley. The Baron jumped eagerly at the task, for the chevalier undoubtedly would have letters for him from France or Germany.