By Brian Melican
“Prussia is not a country with an army, but an army with a country”; “Whereas most states have an army, the Prussian army has a state”; “Prussia was an army in search of a country.” Made in various guises by contemporaries and later historians alike, this pithy observation about the primary precursor of modern Germany was first coined by Voltaire at the end of the reign of Frederick William I. When “the Soldier King” died in 1740, his scattered territories along the Baltic and on the North German plain were fielding 80,000 soldiers—3% of the population—giving Prussia the fourth-largest army in Europe while it ranked only twelfth by number of inhabitants.
