Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher

• 1. Introduction

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  Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher was 74 years old, still reeking of schnapps and rhubarb liniment, still aching from being trampled under cavalry horses two days earlier, when he led his army on a muddy night march to rescue the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. His soldiers called him Marschall Vorwärts, Marshal Forward. Not because of any grand strategic gift, but because forward was the only direction he understood.

  His story stretches from a port city on the Baltic to the rain-soaked fields of Belgium, from a Swedish cavalry charge to the decisive battle that ended the Napoleonic era. He was captured by the enemy, dismissed by his own king, and still managed to become the most decorated Prussian-German soldier in history alongside Paul von Hindenburg. Who was Blücher, and how did a man Frederick the Great once told to go to the devil end up saving Europe?

• 2. The Accidental Prussian

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  Blücher was born on the 16th of December 1742 in Rostock, a Baltic port in the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. His father, Christian Friedrich von Blücher, was a retired army captain, and the family had held land in northern Germany since at least the 13th century.

  At sixteen, he joined the Swedish Army as a hussar. Sweden was at war with Prussia at the time, in the Seven Years' War. In the Pomeranian campaign of 1760, Prussian hussars captured him in a skirmish. The colonel of that Prussian regiment, Wilhelm Sebastian von Belling, who happened to be a distant relative, was so impressed by the young man that he brought him into his own unit on the spot.

  Blücher spent the rest of the Seven Years' War fighting for Prussia. He grew into a skilled light cavalry officer, but peace proved harder for him than war. His restlessness found an ugly outlet in 1772, when he staged a mock execution of a priest he suspected of backing Polish uprisings. He was passed over for promotion as a consequence.

  The following year, Blücher submitted a letter of resignation so rude that Frederick the Great replied: "Captain Blücher can take himself to the devil." He left the army and became a farmer. Within fifteen years, he had gained financial independence and joined the Freemasons. Frederick died in 1786, and within a year, Blücher was reinstated as a major in his old regiment, the Red Hussars, as if the king's grudge had been the only thing standing between him and the uniform he was made to wear.

• 3. Rising Through the Revolutionary Wars

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  Back in the Red Hussars, Blücher's advancement was rapid. He took part in the expedition to the Netherlands in 1787 and was promoted to lieutenant colonel the following year. In 1789, Prussia awarded him the Pour le Mérite, the kingdom's highest military order.

  In 1793 and 1794, he fought the French Revolutionary armies in cavalry actions along the Rhine. On the 28th of May 1794, he won a victory at Kirrweiler that earned him promotion to major general. He became colonel of the Red Hussars that same year. By 1801, he was a lieutenant general.

  His campaign journal from these years, covering 1793 to 1794, was published in Berlin in 1796 under the title Kampagne-Journal der Jahre 1793 und 1794. A second edition appeared in 1914, bundled with letters under the title Vorwärts! Ein Husaren-Tagebuch, introduced by General Field Marshal von der Goltz. The journal offered later generations a rare first-hand account of the cavalry warfare that made Blücher's reputation, before the larger stage of the Napoleonic Wars transformed him into a legend.

• 4. Catastrophe and Capitulation

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  By 1806, Blücher was one of the loudest voices in Prussia pushing for war against Napoleon. He served as a cavalry general in what became one of the worst military disasters Prussia had ever suffered. At the double Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, Blücher fought at Auerstedt and led repeated cavalry charges, none of which succeeded.

  As the Prussian armies collapsed, Blücher commanded the rearguard during the retreat. He pulled together the remnants of several broken units, including a division formerly under Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar. Working with his new chief of staff, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, he reorganised these men into two small corps totaling 21,000 soldiers and 44 cannons.

  His luck ran out at the Battle of Lübeck on the 6th of November 1806. Two French corps defeated him there. The next day, trapped against the Danish frontier with 40,000 French troops closing in, he was forced to surrender at Ratekau with fewer than 10,000 men.

  Even in defeat, Blücher imposed his will on the capitulation. He insisted that the surrender document state he had yielded only because of a lack of provisions and ammunition, and that his soldiers be saluted by a French formation lining the street. He was permitted to keep his sabre and move freely on his word of honour. He was exchanged for the future Marshal Claude Victor-Perrin, Duc de Belluno, and returned to active duty in Pomerania.

• 5. War of Liberation

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  In 1812, Blücher spoke so openly against Prussia's alliance with France that he was recalled from his military governorship of Pomerania and effectively banished from court. When the War of Liberation began in the spring of 1813, the Prussians needed him back immediately.

  He was given command of the Army of Silesia, with August von Gneisenau and Karl von Müffling as his principal staff officers. Under his command during the autumn campaign were 40,000 Prussians and 50,000 Russians. He fought at Lützen and Bautzen early in the campaign, before using the summer truce to reorganise his forces.

  When the war resumed, his most distinctive quality was an unrelenting energy that unnerved his Allied counterparts. Other coalition commanders were prone to hesitation; Blücher made clear he would attack regardless, and that pressure alone often pushed wavering generals into following. He defeated Marshal MacDonald at the Battle of Katzbach, then his victory over Marshal Marmont at Möckern cleared the path to Leipzig.

  On the 16th of October 1813, the day of the Battle of Möckern, Blücher was promoted to field marshal. His own army stormed Leipzig on the final evening of the Battle of Leipzig, the engagement later called the Battle of the Nations. It was the fourth time he had faced Napoleon directly, and the first time he had won. The king awarded him the title Prince of Wahlstatt and granted him estates near Krieblowitz in Lower Silesia, plus a grand mansion at 2, Pariser Platz in Berlin.

• 6. Breakdown and the Road to Paris

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  The winter campaign of 1813-1814, pushing into north-eastern France itself, produced fresh disasters alongside the victories. After early successes at Brienne and La Rothière, Napoleon turned on Blücher personally, defeating the Prussian army repeatedly at Champaubert, Vauchamps, and Montmirail in rapid succession.

  Blücher held. His victory over the outnumbered French at Laon, fought across the 9th and the 10th of March 1814, effectively settled the campaign. But the accumulated strain broke him. He temporarily lost his sight and suffered a delusional episode, during which he was convinced that a Frenchman had impregnated him with an elephant. The historian Dominic Lieven wrote that the breakdown revealed how fragile the coalition's command structure was and how completely the Army of Silesia had depended on Blücher's drive, courage, and charisma. For more than a week after Laon, that army played no useful role in the war.

  Blücher recovered sufficiently to coordinate with Prince Schwarzenberg's Army of Bohemia, and the two forces marched together toward Paris. The allied victory at Montmartre, the entry into the French capital, and the fall of the First Empire followed. When Oxford University later granted Blücher an honorary doctorate, he joked that if he was made a doctor, they should at least make Gneisenau an apothecary, adding: "if I wrote the prescription, he made the pills."

• 7. The Last Campaign

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  Blücher had barely settled into his Silesian estates when Napoleon returned from Elba. He was given command of the Army of the Lower Rhine, with Gneisenau again as his chief of staff.

  At the Battle of Ligny on the 16th of June 1815, the Prussians were defeated and Blücher found himself trapped under his dead horse, repeatedly ridden over by French cavalry. His aide-de-camp, Count Nostitz, threw a greatcoat over him to hide his rank and identity. His life was saved by that single act. As Blücher was unable to command for several hours, Gneisenau took control and withdrew the army, directing the retreat toward Wavre rather than Liège, a choice that kept open the possibility of joining forces with Wellington.

  Blücher treated his wounds with rhubarb liniment and schnapps, then returned to command. He pressed Gneisenau, who distrusted Wellington, to send two corps toward Waterloo. On the afternoon of the 18th of June 1815, after a tortuous march along muddy paths, Blücher's army arrived on the field. Bernard Cornwell quotes soldiers who attested to Blücher's mood that day: "Forwards! I hear you say it's impossible, but it has to be done! I have given my promise to Wellington, and you surely don't want me to break it?"

  Blücher's vanguard drew off Napoleon's badly needed reserves. His troops in their final assault on Plancenoit pushed the Old Guard back. Wellington's army overcame the Middle Guard at the same time. The two coalition armies entered Paris on the 7th of July. Blücher's forces then pursued the retreating French with relentless intensity, the chase that turned a battle victory into a total collapse of the Napoleonic order.

• 8. Legacy and Memory

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  Napoleon's private assessment of Blücher was pointed: a very brave soldier, no talent as a general, but with the stubborn quality of a bull that charges when it sees danger and always gets back on its feet for the next fight.

  Prussian military thinkers later credited Blücher with establishing a distinct Prussian way of war, one that prioritised finding the enemy quickly, concentrating all available force, and delivering the decisive blow at any cost. The model owed a great deal to Napoleon's own approach, but Blücher applied it with a blunt personal ferocity that was entirely his own.

  His civilian legend was just as vivid. The German saying ran wie Blücher gehen, meaning to advance with aggressive directness in any endeavour, derives specifically from his charge at the Battle of Katzbach in 1813. George Stephenson named one of his early locomotives after Blücher. The small mining village near Stephenson's birthplace in Wylam also carries the name Blucher. Three ships of the German navy bore his name, including the heavy cruiser Blücher, completed in September 1939 and sunk four days after its service readiness date during the invasion of Norway.

  Blücher died at Krieblowitz on the 12th of September 1819, aged 76. An imposing mausoleum was built to hold his remains. When Soviet forces took Krieblowitz in 1945, they broke into the mausoleum and scattered what was inside. After 1989, a Polish priest retrieved some of the remains and interred them in the catacomb of the church in Sośnica, three kilometres from what is now the Polish village of Krobielowice, the same ground Blücher had received from his king as a reward for Leipzig.