Prussian War Elephants

Part of the enjoyment of reading is being metaphorically smacked in the brain by a cold wet fish straight out of nowhere. Or, in this case, a gigantic tusked mammal. I’ve read a lot of military history over the past couple of years, and a lot of weird and strange stuff, but this has hands down got to be the weirdest, strangest thing I’ve ever read in a book on war:

… Yet the average Prussian regular soldier was a tough specimen, and no one in the army was tougher than the commander-in-chief, Prince Gebhard von Blücher, whose seventy-three years belied an offensive spirit second to none. His splendid nickname – Marshal Vorwärts (‘Marshal Forwards’) – was well-deserved.

Not everything about Blucher inspired confidence, however, since he suffered from occasional mental disturbances, including the delusions that he had been impregnated by an elephant and that the French had bribed his servants to heat the floors of his rooms so that he would burn his feet. The Prussian high command nonetheless exhibited a commendably broad-minded attitude towards these disorders; their army chief of staff General Gerhard von Scharnhorst wrote that Blücher ‘must lead as though he has a hundred elephants inside him’.

- from Waterloo: June 18, 1815, the Battle for Modern Europe, by Andrew Roberts, page 24

Ok. Now that I’ve passed that little tidbit along to you, I’m going to try my best to bleach my memory of it.