Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, 1755-1801

Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, 1755–1801. Charles Edward White. Warwick, England: Helion & Co., 2020.

Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, 1755–1801, the long-awaited prequel to The Enlightened Soldier, is a detailed account of the developmental period of Scharnhorst’s Bildung, when he matured into the enlightened soldier.[1] Unlike most writing about Scharnhorst, in Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, Charles White focuses exclusively on the less well known period of his life while he was still serving in Hanover. In doing so, White explores how the seeds of military Bildung initially take root and begin to blossom in Scharnhorst’s life.[2]

BUY ON AMAZON

If, like me, when you were first introduced to Scharnhorst, you were eager to read everything Scharnhorst had written only to be dismayed to discover that it remained without an English translation, dismay no more. White captures much of Scharnhorst’s early writing, both in summary and quoting at length, making Scharnhorst’s thinking available to the English reader in a way heretofore impossible. Scharnhorst: The Formative Years takes a detailed biographical approach, not unlike that used by the late Peter Paret in Clausewitz and the State, and marches the reader through the personal and professional development of Scharnhorst’s life and theories in historical context.[3]

Scharnhorst: The Formative Years can be usefully broken down into three phases of Scharnhorst’s own formation, each focusing on a different aspect of his Bildung. First, White addresses Scharnhorst as an academic, focusing on his education and writings in the first 15 years of his career, where his Bildung took root. Second, he turns to Scharnhorst’s formative war-time experiences during the War of the First Coalition, where he applied Bildung in operations. Finally, White turns to Scharnhorst’s frustrating efforts to reform the Hanoverian Army—an attempt to institutionalize Bildung.

For institutions, there are some limiting factors that prevent simply reproducing Scharnhorst’s career path in the modern military. Scharnhorst was 40 years old when he first saw combat.[7] He spent 15 years studying the art and science of war. The average officer today is nearing retirement by that age and does  not receive that much academic exposure collectively throughout his or her career. Nonetheless, Scharnhorst: The Formative Years does provide lessons for the modern professional military. The humanities and liberal arts—broad, general education backgrounds—should be the goal in recruiting rather than focusing solely on specialty hard sciences. Scharnhorst understood that “[t]o understand his profession, the officer must have some idea of its relationship to other fields of knowledge and the ways in which they contribute to his own.”[8] So, Scharnhorst studied deeply and widely. This need for a broad educational base is all the more true today when the military profession is called on to execute military operations below the threshold of actual war.

Just as there are institutional limiting factors that prevent replicating Scharnhorst’s career, individual officers cannot afford to spend disproportionate portions of their careers in academic environments focusing on self-development. So, self-study must be particularly impactful. The military officer must do more than merely read military history. Self-study must be “broad, intellectual, and critical.”[10] It must equip officers with ideas from all walks of life so that when their conduct is not prescribed “by regulations or the orders of his immediate superiors, he can find in himself the necessary lights to take a proper course.”[11] That is, the goal of formal education and of self-study must be to develop Bildung. Bildung consists of both the exposure to other people and their ideas, group-study, as well as the reflective analysis that takes place during self-study. Only when this is taken up critically and reflectively, can we fan the flames of our internal, necessary lights. Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, through a very detailed analysis of Scharnhorst’s syncretic private studies, provides an example of how professional officers ought to structure their personal study beyond merely reading their service chief’s professional reading list so that it is broad, intellectual, and critical.

Second, during the War of the First Coalition, Scharnhorst’s theories are tested, and we see him grow from an academic with no real-world experience to the leader of the nascent Hanoverian General Staff—even as only a frocked captain. Throughout this part we learn in tedious detail that the personnel administrative processes of two hundred years ago could be just as painfully slow and subject to the vagaries of personality as they can be today. Throughout much of Scharnhorst’s time in Hanover, his superior theoretical work and operational performance was greeted by prejudice for the old ways since he was not nobility. It is here that White is most candid about Scharnhorst’s character. Scharnhorst’s drive and ambition for personal advancement, while never impacting his performance, had a flair of self-promotion about it.

What is clear from the primary sources, however, is that he seems to have kept his ambition confined to his personal correspondence with his wife, Klara. This phase of his life forms both the bulk of the work and is the most valuable portion. It is White’s explanation of his theories during the operational context of the war that allows the reader to best grasp both Scharnhorst’s Bildung in action as well as his ability to understand “how theory and practice are linked.”[12]

Throughout the narrative of the War of the First Coalition, White explains how Scharnhorst realized that “the advent of mass, citizen armies demanded a much more efficient means of command and control.”[13] It was this realization that brought him to develop the concept of the General Staff with Troops—not a national headquarters staff like he would later advocate in Prussia—but an operational level staff that could collate intelligence, logistics, fires, and operations generally into a cohesive effort.[14] Such a staff would act as the brain and nervous center of an army at the operational level. In essence, Scharnhorst was the first to realize that war had become too complex for a singular genius to be relied on if for no other reason than because he could not be everywhere at once. Napoleon was successful operating as a singular genius for so long only because his opponents reacted to Scharnhorst’s ideas with the prejudice reserved for the prophet in his own country. It is the operational context of these revelations that Scharnhorst: The Formative Years uses to help the reader to understand how the context in which reform takes place is critically important to the shape of those reforms.

White is also keen to include the moral implications of Bildung throughout the work. For example, Scharnhorst’s Bildung not only affected his operational thinking, but it also affected his moral appraisal of the conflict. When faced with conduct that violated the law of war, Scharnhorst connected the offenders’ immoral conduct to their lack of Bildung. Conversely, only those with Bildung “sought to alleviate the horrors of war.”[15] Witnessing rape, murder, and plunder go unpunished and even encouraged by officers, Scharnhorst began to intellectually tie a sound system of military justice to good order and discipline, and thus the operational effectiveness, of the army—reforms he would later implement in Prussia.[16]

Ultimately, Scharnhorst’s Bildung, the foundation of all of his theories and abilities, proved itself in the trial of combat. The War of the First Coalition provided the opportunity for him to put the years of academic study to the test. As a leader of soldiers in combat and as a staff officer guiding decisions, Scharnhorst was innovative, inspirational, and analytical to the enduring benefit of the Coalition and all because of his focused military Bildung.

Reorganisation by Carl Röchling (Wikimedia)

Finally, Scharnhorst: The Formative Years outlines those events in Scharnhorst’s life that are critical in understanding why his later more famous reform efforts were successful. From Scharnhorst’s failures at reforming the Hanoverian military as well as with his successes with the Prussian military, we learn how large-scale reform can be accomplished. It takes both individual actions, as well as institutional open-mindedness. More importantly, it takes Bildung at all levels, enlisted and officer alike.

Ultimately, as explained, unless and until our institutional and individual professional military education are reformed to inculcate Bildung, that exposure to other people and their ideas and the reflective analysis of self-study, we will not be flexible or adaptable enough to shift paradigms within the same generation because we will be incapable of seeing beyond our internal biases. We will have to wait until the next generation comes behind us with a fresh point of view. This is the underlying theme of Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, and White articulates it most clearly when explaining Scharnhorst’s reform efforts in Hanover.

More than 30 years ago, at the peak of the maneuver warfare revolution in the U.S. Marine Corps, White published The Enlightened Soldier. Despite the author spending his career with the U.S. Army, this work has developed something of a cult following in the Marine Corps. While White’s earlier work offering a framework for military education was published  during a moment when the Marine Corps’s commandant was particularly focused on education, his current work is equally timely as the Marine Corps begins to reform itself for a renewed emphasis on great power competition. In Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, White explains how the enlightened soldier was made, and doing so provides a template for how both individuals and institutions can prepare for sweeping structural changes as well as warnings about the kinds of prejudices and biases against innovation that must be avoided. If the Marine Corps is to succeed with its force redesign in an era of renewed great power competition, it could do worse than understanding the fountainhead of one of the broadest and quickest military reform movements in history. Thankfully, White gives us just that in Scharnhorst: The Formative Years.

Michael D. Minerva is a judge advocate in the U.S. Marine Corps. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not represent the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Charles Edward White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militärische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801–1805 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1989).

[2] “For Scharnhorst, Bildung was the mental fitness that empowered the military leader. It enabled him to assimilate knowledge from a variety of sources and then to synthesize and fashion that data into an appropriate response to the challenge at hand. It was a recurrent process rather than mere training to accomplish a certain skill.” Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, x.

[3] Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976).

[4] Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, 83, 103, and 131.

[5] See Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 354–63. The Advanced Warfighting Schools in each of the services seem to be the only institutions whose curriculum and standards approach those required by Scharnhorst. Unfortunately, the vast majority of officers do not attend those schools.

[6] The Enlightened Soldier, 191. Scharnhorst would later seek to avoid these difficulties through the Militärische Gesellschaft, which White explores in The Enlightened Soldier.

[7] Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, 131.

[8] Ibid., 55.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 58.

[11] Ibid., quoting Wilhelm zu Schamburg-Lippe, ‘Mèmoire sur les Exercises de Meditation Militaire,’ in Ochwadt (ed.), Wilhelm Graf zu Schamburg-Lippe, Vol. 2, Section 3 (119–20).

[12] Ibid., 51.

[13] Ibid., 205.

[14] Ibid., 205.

[15] Ibid., 148.

[16] Ibid., 147, 161.