This drawing shows a heavy field gun being taken forward on the battlefield. The field artillery at this time was much less mobile than the infantry or cavalry, an indication of this is that the name applied to field artillery wass "position artillery". Batteries were referred to as "brigades", and the Prussians usually had ten guns per "brigade".

It was very difficult to move the field guns once they had been deployed at the start of a battle, although on occasion this was done successfully (for example at Leuthen in 1757 the Prussian guns were advanced from one position to the next and supported the infantry attack to great effect, the Prussians were never able to repeat this success). The Prussian organisation was not even fully a military one, in that horses and drivers were assembled at the beginning of a war or campaign; being civilians they had rather little desire to expose themselves to danger and when a battle went badly for the Prussians they tended to lose large numbers of guns because the drivers would simply flee. This shortcoming was not remedied until after Jena in 1806, when during the course of the army reforms a fully-organised Train was created.