Prussian Army Soldiers and the Seven Years' War: The Psychology of Honour.

In his picaresque novel, I The Luck of Barry Lyndon i , William Thackeray depicted a Prussian army in the Seven Years War whose soldiers were lashed into subordination. Based on a range of soldiers' autobiographical writings, the authors argue that, far from being unfeeling automatons, Prussian soldiers drew on a complex range of coping mechanisms to manage their experience of battle. A number of recent works have, however, challenged the view that the soldiers of eighteenth-century armies were brutalized automatons herded into combat by officers who wielded fearful disciplinary powers. [Extracted from the article]