Jägers

These light infantry are armed with rifles. As skirmishers, they harass the enemy through accurate sniping.

Hard-working and hard-drinking, these hard men are hardened to every conceivable hardship; they are tough, and loyal soldiers to their superior officers. The jägers remain in the Russian army until the day they die, almost as military serfs; most of them were serfs anyway. They have a lifetime of experience of living off the land, and a fearsome reputation for being rather barbaric. Despite this, they are not well suited to the discipline of close combat, and are much more use when peppering an enemy with musket balls.

Strangely, the Tsar’s troops were assigned regiments depending on their physical size. The tallest always became grenadiers, and the smallest were destined for the jäger battalions. But physique is no guarantee of soldierly qualities and in 1811 Field Marshal Barclay de Tolly changed the system so that personal merit and worth determined a man’s assignment. Even more strangely, this practice of “sizing” soldiers went on in the Russian Soviet army as well, but for the practical reason that tall or bulky men simply would not fit into tanks: the design philosophy of Russian tanks was to make them as low as possible, hence the lack of space inside.