ABSTRACT

In 1801 Gerhard Johann Scharnhorst applied to the King of Prussia for employment in the Prussian Army. He did this because the Prussian Army at that time was accounted the most important in Germany and held out greater prospects of advancement than either the Hanoverian or Danish Army, the latter of which had offered him an appointment. Napoleon extending his power over Southern and Western Germany and over Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. From Egypt he was threatening Britain’s possessions in India. Yet Prussia, gorged with her acquisitions from the second partition of Poland, sought diligently to retain her neutrality. The Quartermaster-General’s staff consisted of twenty-one officers, and all save Scharnhorst came from titled families. The special military ranks which these men carried being, it is believed, without any British counterparts, it will be best to give them in the original German.