By the late eighteenth century, German writers had long boasted of the warlike character of their people. A Hessian officer returned from America wrote:

Non-Germans were not quite so flattering of the role Teutonic arms played in the wars of the time. The French military writer Guibert was not alone when he spoke of the ‘mania of all these little [German] sovereigns to have battlements and troops’. A contemporary English travel book described Germany as ‘the qfficina gentium, the great nursery of the North, from which swarms of men have been drawn in all ages’. This warlike character took the form, not of a German bid for European domination, for Germany itself was divided into a multiplicity of states; but of Germans providing trained contingents for the armies of the great powers, in return for pay.

This commerce in soldiers went back to the break up of the Mediaeval German Empire. The feudal levy had ceased to turn out, but there was no bureaucratic state apparatus for raising, equipping, paying, and maintaining men, nor for collecting taxes to support them.