Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [166]
Everything, then, rested on the shoulders of Prussia’s own soldiers, but this was to ask too much of them. So precipitately did Prussia go to war that there was not time to call up all the reserves - in contrast to most of the armies of Europe, the bulk of Potsdam’s soldiers were reservists who were only mobilized in time of war - and Frederick William therefore took the field at the head of a field army of only 150,000 men, when the number might have been at least 200,000. By the same token there were neither magazines for the field army, nor adequate stocks of food in any of the country’s fortresses. As for the quality of the army, the ordinary soldiers were well drilled enough, but their efficacy was undermined - as with Austria in 1805- by a piecemeal series of military reforms that, though well meant, had made things worse rather than better. Thus the army had for the first time been organized into divisions in the French style, but they were, on the one hand, too big and, on the other, very poorly put together. The cavalry were mixed in with the infantry, as had been the case in the French army in the 1790s, and each division was also given too much artillery, the result being, first, formations that were difficult to manage and, second, a considerable dilution in the striking power of horsemen and cannon alike. Finally, in face-to-face conflict with the French, the infantry would certainly be at a disadvantage. There were a number of specialist light-infantry battalions - a few of them riflemen and the rest soldiers known as fusiliers armed with a lighter version of the standard musket - trained in skirmishing tactics, but there were never enough of these units and attempts to make good the want by using the third rank of each line battalion as skirmishers were no substitute as the men had no proper organizational structure. Though the basic tactical system remained sound - the linear formations in which the Prussian army was to fight in 1806 were exactly the same as those in which the British army triumphed at Waterloo - the army therefore went to war at a considerable disadvantage.
As if all this was not enough, Prussia moved on Napoleon at a moment of maximum British distraction. In September 1806 London’s attention rested not on Eastern Europe but on the Spanish empire in America. In 1805 Britain had dispatched an expeditionary force to the Dutch colony of the Cape. The local militia having been quickly worsted at Blauewberg, on 18 January 1806 the governor surrendered. At this point, however, matters took an unexpected turn. Thrusting, ambitious and greedy for prize-money, the commander of the squadron that had transported the British forces to the Cape, Sir Home Popham, suddenly sailed off to attack Buenos Aires, which at this time was the capital of the Virreinato de la Plata, an enormous territory incorporating present-day Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia. Though Popham had with him only a very few troops - no more than 1,600 - on 25 June 1806 the ill-defended city duly fell. Exultant at this success, the victor now set his sights on even greater spoils. Eager to see himself established as pro-consul of a new colonial empire, he sent a grandiloquent report of the possibilities on offer in South America to London together with a consignment of something over £ million that had been looted from the treasury of the Spanish administration. Although the government had known of what was afoot since July, it was not until Popham’s victory dispatch arrived on 13 September that news reached the public.