The years of exhaustion which followed the great war-period at the beginning of the nineteenth century were not calculated to inspire a warlike spirit in the Prussian army and to shape its training with a view to the needs of war. Hence a pronounced tendency in the direction of review tactics very soon manifested itself. This phenomenon has frequently occurred after wars of long duration, and it is easily understandable. But it is all the more important that we should be on our guard against its reappearance. The ambition of Frederick the Great to see that "admirable discipline" of his troops, which had become relaxed in the course of the Seven Years' War, once more restored allowed him to overlook many an extravagance which the resurgent drill-devil provoked in the army. His own thoughts, as his later writings prove, were always concerned with the needs of actual war and the most glorious side of the soldierly profession, but his generals became more and more immersed in the minor arts of the drilling-ground. The uneventful course of the Bavarian War of Succession was not calculated to diminish the pedantry of peace drill. The tendency in the direction of review tactics, which again became predominant in the first decades following the War of Liberation, had begun to manifest itself in a peculiar way during the war, even in the Prussian army, and first of all in the Guards. It was our brotherhood in arms with the Russians which resulted in the marked predominance of parade drill (as though it were not a means to an end, but in itself the end of training), and with it a tendency to triviality. The manœuvres in the environments of Berlin were, under Frederick William III., merely spectacles; they degenerated for the most part into mere military sports. The Tsar Alexander and his brothers all took the same unspeakable delight in military pedantry, and it could not but happen that, in view of the intimate ties of blood and friendship which existed between the Courts of Petrograd and Berlin, similar tendencies should have been transmitted to Prussia. Thus that training which had been originally derived from Prussian models, though endowed with greater rigour after the manner of the Tsar Paul, which, moreover, was organised entirely with a view to outward show in a manner quite opposed to the old Prussian models, was reintroduced into Prussia in this distorted form.