> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rubiconmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The King Who Would Not Fold - URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/the-king-who-would-not-fold/ - Published: 2026-09-09T16:52:12.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-09T17:17:31.000Z - Description: So long as Prussia retained the will to resist, her enemies would quarrel and bicker before finally losing the spirit to continue warring. All he had to do was cling on. Showalter has melted the idol of the invincible tactician and found, underneath, a man who could not be made to stop. - Author: Rubicon - Tags: #featured, #online-only, #pos-3 by Frederick Metzen *Frederick the Great: A Military History* by Dennis Showalter, Frontline Books, 2012\. Originally published as *The Wars of Frederick the Great* (Longman, 1996). 372 pp. A cornerstone of classic military history is the trope of the martial genius, the field commander without equal, the man of such innate talent in the waging of war that he towers above all the competition of his age, if not in achievement then at least in ability. Often these men are also in the most unenviable of military roles: outnumbered and outgunned, fighting an enemy of seemingly infinite resources and willpower. Theirs is the place of the tragic hero. As the historian Adrian Goldsworthy has said, “There is something Romantic about the commander who is incredibly gifted, but loses.” For decades the smashing of idols has been perhaps the only *raison d’être* for military history as a discipline, and Dennis Showalter’s *Frederick the Great: A Military History* opens as if it meant to join the iconoclasts. Its introduction builds the case for the prosecution with evident relish. Frederick abandoned two battlefields, Mollwitz and Lobositz, “under dubious circumstances.” He spent the hours after the defeat at Kolin “aimlessly drawing circles in the dirt with a stick.” He “carried grudges against entire regiments for decades,” and his handling of subordinates was “too consistent to be casual.” Showalter wagers that had Frederick not been Prussia’s king, he “might have been a viable candidate for one of its madhouses.” Yet the book’s purpose is not to tear down for the sake of it. Rather, it is to melt down that idol and to recast it into something purer, more refined, and truer to the essence of the subject. In so doing, he showcases something even more worthy of idolization. The book is organized chronologically across seven chapters and a concluding set of reflections. The first chapter lays the groundwork for Prussia’s geopolitical position in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Prussia’s diminutive size and limited resources, human as well as material, coupled with her being surrounded by powerful enemies, clashed sharply with the outsized ambitions of her recent monarchs. Showalter’s Brandenburg-Prussia of the mid-seventeenth century is “an oyster without a shell,” a state that spent decades moving from one alliance to the next, making itself an indispensable ally rather than a target of hostility or invasion. Five chapters then follow the wars themselves, from the seizure of Silesia in 1740 to the exhausted peace of 1763\. This framing demonstrates that it took a man like Frederick, bold as well as reckless, energetic as well as stubborn, simultaneously innovative and dogmatic, to realize those dreams and earn Prussia its famous place in history. Frederick was the last European monarch, and one of the last rulers anywhere, born into royalty not only to demonstrate an aptitude for war but to lead armies in the field and, by his own intellect and talent, win victories. His talent encompassed matters of administration and innovation. As an absolute monarch, his charge was total control over the state, and this attention extended to his army, of whose administration and organization he absorbed and understood every detail. He innovated and wrote extensively on the conduct of war at every level: strategic, tactical, organizational, and logistical, as well as operational, a concept not fully developed until the early twentieth century. His “General Principles” of 1748 contained what Showalter calls a “simple assertion” that “seemed at the time a condition virtually contrary to fact”: that it was possible to fight outnumbered and win, even against long odds. The operative instrument was the “oblique order.” “Frederick was flying in the face of conventional wisdom,” Showalter writes, “when he informed his senior officers that numerical inferiority offered precisely the most favorable opportunity for employing ‘my oblique order.’” Frederick also popularized Jean-Charles de Folard’s idea of the *coup d’œil*, or glance of the eye. This was the aptitude to read a map, or look at a piece of terrain from a high hilltop, and immediately understand the points of interest, comprehend the lay of the land, and anticipate how the battle would unfold. While the Prussian king believed this was something that could be trained and instilled in any officer—he viewed it as a requirement for senior command—later figures, like Napoleon and Clausewitz, believed it to be innate. One either possessed it or one did not. Napoleon had it; Frederick did also. Like Alexander the Great, who inherited the fearsome Macedonian army from the reforms of his father Philip II, Frederick came to the throne in 1740, aged twenty-eight, inheriting an army that had been molded into one of Europe’s best. This had been achieved through decades of autarkic economic policy with the singular purpose of supporting a disproportionately powerful army. Frederick was also a great statesman: a reformer and modernizer, a patron of the arts, a genuine intellectual, even a talented flautist and composer. Yet his first outing as a warlord was not flattering. In his youth he cared little for the affairs of state or the military, preferring intellectual pursuits, and this reputation spread throughout Europe, such that when he ascended the throne he felt he had something to prove. In December 1740, amid the political crisis caused by the succession of Maria Theresa to the Austrian throne, Frederick led the Prussian army into the resource-rich Austrian province of Silesia. When Austria responded with an army of its own, an overconfident Frederick allowed himself to be outmaneuvered. When he finally offered battle at Mollwitz in April 1741, the fighting opened with near-catastrophe; Frederick acquiesced when his generals begged him to leave the field for his own safety. Shortly thereafter the Austrians were driven back in defeat. Showalter is exact about who won that day: “the real victors of Mollwitz were the Prussian infantrymen – and the system of training that produced them.” Frederick was horribly embarrassed, and he had learned much. The fighting for Silesia continued on and off for another four and a half years, and subsequent campaigns proved that he had indeed learned. The 1745 Battle of Hohenfriedberg, his greatest victory of this war, is conventionally cited as the debut of the famous oblique order, advancing with most of his troops on one flank to maximize firepower and the shock of the attack. The concept of concentrating against a flank, he notes, “was hardly original to the King of Prussia”; commanders from Epaminondas to Marlborough had sought it, and Montecuccoli, Folard, and Feuquières had all formalized it in ink. More pointedly, Showalter’s examination of the battle itself suggests “less the first, tentative application of the oblique order than an attempt to execute the more traditional maneuvers of a night march and a flank attack. Once the fighting started, Frederick virtually ceased to command anything.” The “decisive charge” of the legendary Bayreuth Dragoons regiment “owed as much to serendipity as to initiative” as “no particular reason existed why the regiment should have been where it was at 8 a.m. on 4 June, as opposed to being in half a dozen other locations.” The chorus of praise that followed, he concludes, “generated a certain *post facto* tendency to confuse fighting power with virtuosity.” The year 1745 ended with a peace treaty acknowledging Prussia’s victory. Silesia’s annexation augmented Prussia’s territory, population, and wealth substantially. Frederick spent the next several years reforming and expanding the army; so too did the vengeful Austrians, who never ceased hoping to reclaim the province. In European courts Frederick was no longer viewed as an upstart dandy-king of a second-rate power, but as a serious diplomatic player and a threat to many of his neighbors. Austria, France, and Russia entered negotiations to form an anti-Prussian alliance. War broke out again in 1756 when Frederick, seeking to preempt this, invaded the smaller neighboring state of Saxony, aligned with the Austrians through its allegiance to the Vienna-dominated Holy Roman Empire. Frederick was one of the best strategists of his era. Prussia’s borders had no easily defensible rivers or mountain passes that would slow the advance of an enemy army. He knew he would be outnumbered. His only hope for long-term success, surrounded as he was by enemies, was to use his interior lines, marching his armies along shorter routes to meet each successive threat. He rightly did not believe Prussia could fight a defensive war over the course of years with any prospect of success. Therefore he moved first and struck hard and fast, hoping to catch his enemies off balance and prevent them from coordinating a strategy against him. Every time he went to battle he hoped to annihilate the enemy army and kindle a decisive turn in the war. The oblique order was a crucial component of this strategy. Military thinking and doctrine of the era allowed for few other innovations in tactics; it was not until the French Revolution that the manner in which battles were fought changed in any significant way. His campaign of 1757 is the most famous. Prussian troops occupied Saxony in late 1756\. A successful invasion of Austrian Bohemia in spring 1757 resulted in a bloody victory at Prague that May, where the leading Prussian regiments, advancing with muskets still at the shoulder, “took casualties approaching 50 per cent.” The exhaustion of his troops meant Frederick could not capitalize on the victory, capture the wealthy and politically important city, or destroy the Austrian army. Instead he was defeated one month later at Kolin when the more numerous Austrians returned; the oblique order failed, leaving one-third of his army dead, wounded, or captured. Reeling and driven back into Prussia, Frederick suddenly faced invasion by two armies, the Austrians to the southeast and a combined Franco-Imperial army from the west, each larger than his own. If they combined forces, defeat was assured. As he rested and reinforced his battered army, things escalated: Sweden and Russia joined the war against Prussia, Britain’s Hanoverian army was neutralized by France, and Austrian troops briefly raided Berlin. Without British subsidies the Prussian state would soon become insolvent. The king despaired of victory, but privately. Frederick, Showalter writes, was “testing a broad spectrum of what modern popular psychologists call ‘coping mechanisms’. At times he wrote poetry. At times he discussed suicide. At times he proposed to fight to the finish in a hopeless situation.” The private despair “functioned as a safety valve,” and the generals and diplomats who met the king by day had nothing but praise for the “equanimity with which he confronted his situation.” Then he emerged from his agonized state with a greater resolve to fight to the bitter end. Outnumbered two to one, he marched west and destroyed the Franco-Imperial army at Rossbach, inflicting what Showalter calls a “ten-to-one discrepancy in losses” so unusual for the century that it gave the battle “automatic immediate standing as one of Frederick’s greatest victories.” Frederick himself was unsentimental about it: “The Battle of Rossbach merely set me free to seek new dangers in Silesia.” Then, more a master of the operational level of war than any of his contemporaries, he turned and marched east, defeating the Austrians at Leuthen exactly one month later in what has been regarded as his greatest victory. In both battles, the oblique order won the day. Like Napoleon six decades later, Frederick soon came to the uncomfortable realization that he had fought his enemies too often and thereby taught them his art of war; as the French emperor lamented on the victorious but blood-soaked field of Lützen in 1813, “these animals had learned something.” Just the same, Frederick was nevertheless able to win victories and defeat his opponents when circumstances were favorable, even if the results were bloodier than the glorious final days of 1757\. By Torgau in 1760, Showalter writes: > Frederick’s penchant for tactical flanking maneuvers was familiar throughout Europe. At Prague and Kolin he had been able to ignore the Austrians, secure in the knowledge that his march was unlikely to be challenged. At Leuthen he had been able to attract and distract their attention with an exercise in military sleight of hand. Now at Torgau, a mere feint was unlikely to prove sufficient. In reading Showalter’s accounts of Frederick’s later battles, it almost seems that the Prussian king, in battle, was a one-trick pony. He became over-reliant on his favorite tactic, which became increasingly ineffective as his enemies learned from past experiences, and as the famous quality of his own army, worn down by horrendous losses, steadily declined. Subsequent battles tended to be far more sanguinary, and Frederick’s battlefield record suffered. Each engagement, usually attended by setbacks, seemed to push Prussia closer to desolation and defeat. When his army almost dissolved from grim losses and the panic of defeat at Kunersdorf in 1759 and more than 19,000 of the 50,000 men he had taken into battle became casualties, the road to Berlin lay open. “My misfortune is that I survived,” he wrote in agony to his foreign minister. “I believe that everything is lost. I will not survive the destruction of my country. Farewell forever.” Showalter gives the episode no quarter, describing the king as “grandiloquently and hyperbolically declaring he would not survive the disaster,” and adding that “a later, kinder generation may speak of post-traumatic stress. Eighteenth-century armies had other, blunter words for such conduct.” It was only through the mutual mistrust of Russian and Austrian commanders that Prussia’s enemies did not seize the opportunity to capture Berlin and probably end the war—and Frederick’s reign—right there and then. This was the so-called “First Miracle of the House of Hohenzollern.” Within a week the stragglers were returning, “by hundreds, then by thousands,” and by mid-August 24,000 men stood again under the colors. “They were tired; they were demoralized; but they were present.” The second miracle came in January 1762, when the Russian empress Elizabeth died and her successor, Peter III, a prince “with an inordinate admiration for everything Prussian, including above all its King,” immediately took Russia out of the war through a treaty of peace and alliance with Frederick, signaling the beginning of the end of the war. Even as he fell periodically into the darkest depths of suicidal despair, Frederick refused to give in or sue for peace. Before Torgau he declared himself, in Showalter’s paraphrase, “ready to take any risk, even the most desperate, to end the campaign with a victory or a glorious death.” Like most generals before the twentieth century, he constantly exposed himself to enemy fire, not out of foolishness but from a sense of duty and honor. In the disaster at Kunersdorf, his coat was perforated with bullet holes, and a musket ball was stopped only by a snuff box in his pocket. At Torgau in 1760, his final major battle, he was struck by a spent ball from a blast of grapeshot. Dazed and bruised, he was carried from the field. And at Mollwitz he had placed himself at the head of the 11th Cuirassiers to rally his broken troopers. It was in his defeats and his mistakes that he found the will to continue fighting. It is here that the book’s critics must be given their due, because Showalter gives it to them. He cites Franz Szabo, the sharpest of the recent revisionists, who evaluates Frederick’s battlefield performance as a matter of “self-promoting vanity.” “For every military success there were more defeats … \[Prussia’s\] miraculous survival was due to an historic anomaly so bizarre and fantastic as to be almost incredible.” Showalter’s own assessment of Frederick, added in the book’s closing pages, comes closer to Szabo’s than the narrative chapters would lead one to expect. “At operational levels,” he writes, “deadlock is war’s normal condition.” Prussia “was ultimately saved from defeat, perhaps destruction, not by the military genius of its ruler, but by the death of Russia’s Empress Elizabeth.” The army’s training, discipline, and tactics were “refinements rather than innovations.” And his rendered verdict: “Frederick the Great did not transcend his milieu either as soldier or as statesman.” The case is strong, and it is largely right about tactics. When Adrian Goldsworthy spoke of the gifted commander who loses, he referred to men like Pyrrhus, Hannibal, Napoleon, and Robert E. Lee. Like all of those great captains, Frederick lost many battles toward the end of his career. Tactically, he was no Hannibal or Napoleon. Showalter’s own metaphor for the Seven Years War is the gambler’s: the Prussian army “was a hole card high enough to encourage another round of betting even when the King was beaten on the board.” The metaphor is apt. A hole card is worth nothing without a player willing to stay in the game, and every other player at the table, Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, folded first. Yet Showalter skillfully demonstrates that it was Frederick’s refusal, or inability, to submit, coupled with his abilities in the administrative, operational, and strategic conduct of war, that made him a great general. In short, Frederick’s saving grace rested on his stubborn insistence to persist through every setback and endure them with a brave face—at least in public view. But Frederick did not lose in the end. When he died he left Prussia larger, wealthier, and more powerful than when he ascended the throne, and Showalter is clear that “taken in the long run” the Seven Years War “was a marked success.” At its outset Frederick had hoped to score a quick knockout before the war became a general continental conflict. In this he failed, and he feared that Prussia’s time on earth was ending. As the conflict wore on and his innumerable enemies failed to strike the fatal blow, he came to see another path to victory: attrition. So long as Prussia retained the will to resist, her enemies would quarrel and bicker before finally losing the spirit to continue warring. All he had to do was cling on. Showalter has melted the idol of the invincible tactician and found, underneath, a man who could not be made to stop.