[1] He served in the Hanoverian Garde du Corps under Freytag in the Flanders Campaign and was slightly wounded by two sabre cuts on the arm and head at the Battle of Famars 23 May 1793.

[citation needed] On the dissolution of the Hanoverian Army after the convention of Artlenburg, Bock was one of the officers who travelled to England, where he raised four troops of heavy cavalry, designated as the 1st dragoons, King's German Legion, and was gazetted colonel 21 April 1804.

From Ireland Bock, who had attained the rank of major-general in 1810, proceeded to the Peninsular War in 1811 in command of a brigade composed of the two heavy cavalry regiments of the Legion, with which he made the subsequent campaigns in Spain and the south of France in 1812–13.

The steadiness and gallantry of Bock's heavy Germans often won approval, particularly on 23 July 1812, the day after the victory at Salamanca, when in a charge at Garcia Hernandez, they attacked, broke and made prisoner three battalions of French infantry formed in square,[1] usually thought of as a formation impregnable to cavalry.

[2] On 21 January 1814, Bock was drowned together with his son Lewis and other officers when the transport ship Bellona was wrecked on the Tulbest rocks, en route to England.