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History’s Most Lunatic Events and People

Khalid Elhassan August 21, 2020 34 min

La Belle Alliance - Battle of Waterloo — Blucher, left, meeting Wellington at Waterloo. Wikimedia

37. From Soldier to Farmer to Soldier

Blucher retired to the countryside and took up farming. He was good enough at it to gain financial independence. However, after the heated passion of the lunatic moment that led him to resign from the Prussian Army had passed, Blucher had second thoughts about what he had done. He pined for his days as a soldier, and sought to rejoin his regiment.

Unfortunately for him, King Frederick the Great had a long memory, and knew how to hold a grudge. The Prussian monarch did not forget Blucher’s rude resignation, and did not forgive. He blocked Blucher from rejoining his military – a ban that remained in place for the next fifteen years. It was only a year after Frederick the Great died in 1786, that Blucher was allowed to rejoin his regiment, the Red Hussars, as a major.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.