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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

36. A Lunatic Ascends the Ranks

Blucher was a head case – a clear-cut lunatic – and everybody knew it. However, he was still a great fighting officer for all that, so his superiors put up with the crazy and kept on promoting him up the ranks. After fighting in the Netherlands in 1787, he was a made a lieutenant colonel the following year. The year after that, he was awarded the Pour le Merite, Prussia’s then-highest military award.

In the early 1790s, he distinguished himself as a cavalry officer in fighting against the armies of Revolutionary France, and by 1794, he was colonel of his regiment, the Red Hussars. That same year he made another jump up the ranks to major general, and in 1801, he was promoted to lieutenant general.

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.