| Frederick the Great's Military Instruction was
written between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War and translated
into English by Lieut.-Colonel T. Foster at the end of the 18th century. The dedication to
Major General Goldworthy is dated March 1797. I am typing in the 5th edition of 1818. I
will get the full text of the dedication, title page, and preface by Foster in later.
Getting the main text in first is more important. There are surely typos still in it, but
many of the unusual spellings (e.g. defence, pretense, vallies, variations on
Konigingraetz) are from Foster. I haven't put in all the accents on French words like
defile and depot, and umlauts are converted to e's following the umlauted vowel. The schwa
vowels that look like oe stuck together or ae stuck together have been decomposed. I'll
try to make up a list of the more exact versions of such words with the Latin 1 codes in
place later. Please let me know if you come across the sort of typos where you see
"or" where you are expecting "on" that slip through a spelling check
program. Thanks to Stuart McAlpine for sending in a proofreading that I will be checking
against Foster to correct my errors. Note on Distances
Several places in the text you will come upon distances described in leagues, one of the
slipperiest units of distance used in old texts. It is only near the end in article 27
that his usage of leagues is defined clearly, where a distance of 9 or 10 leagues is
equated to 4 or 5 miles, thus a league described here is about half a mile. Except it's a
bit more complicated than that, as Frederick uses German miles, which are five English
Miles (as was explained to me by Ray Cassell), so a league is actually about 2 1/2 English
miles, or around 4 kilometers. Or maybe its the same as the English league of 3 miles that
Ray mentioned in his mail and Frederick was being rough in converting two to a mile.
I maintain links to related material here and at other sites about this period of
warfare on the Horse and
Musket Page, including digitized maps of Frederick's campaigns and battles.
Also check out the companion piece, Frederick's Cavalry Officers Instructions.
Ed Allen
allen@sequence.stanford.edu
Last updated 1/27/97 |
