The Campaign of Königgrätz. Arthur Lockwood Wagner
Prussian twenty years of age is subject to military duty. The term of service is twelve years, of which three are with the colors, four with the reserve and five in the Landwehr. The number of soldiers in the active army is definitely fixed at a little more than one per cent of the population, and the number of recruits annually required is regulated by the number of men necessary to keep the regular force on its authorized peace footing. A list of the young men available for military service is annually made out, and the selection of recruits is made by lot. There are but few exceptions; such, for instance, as young men who are the sole support of indigent parents. Students who are preparing for the learned professions are permitted to serve as “one-year volunteers,” on condition of passing certain examinations satisfactorily, and furnishing their own clothing and equipments. The name of a man convicted of crime is never placed on the list of available recruits; and however humble the position of a private soldier may be, his uniform is the honorable badge of an honest man. Every young man may be called up for draft three years in succession. Those who are not drawn for service at the end of the third year are passed into the Ersatz reserve, in which are also men whose physical imperfections are not sufficient to exempt them entirely, where they are free from service in time of peace, but from which they may be called in time of war to replace drafts from the reserve. In time of peace the military demands upon the soldiers of the reserve or Landwehr are very light. A soldier participates in at least two field maneuvers, aggregating about sixteen weeks, during his four years of service in the reserve. He is also required to attend muster once every spring and autumn. During his five years in the Landwehr he is generally called out twice for drill, the drill period not exceeding fourteen days.
The active army is the regular army, or permanent establishment. When the decree for the mobilization of the army is promulgated, this force is at once put upon its war footing by drafts from the reserve. The depots are immediately formed, and one-half of the troops stationed therein are drawn from the reserve; the other half being recruits from the Ersatz reserve. As these two classes become exhausted, the depot battalions are filled from the Landwehr, the youngest classes being taken first; or, if needs be, the entire Landwehr is called out in battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or even army corps, and sent into the field. After exhausting the Landwehr, there still remains the Landsturm, which embraces all able-bodied men between the ages of seventeen and forty-nine years who do not belong to the active army, the reserve, or the Landwehr. Though the calling out of the Landsturm would imply the exhaustion of the organized forces of the nation, it would be more than a mere levy en masse, as it would bring back into the army many soldiers whose twelve years of service would not have been completely forgotten in the midst of civil vocations.
The machinery for the rapid mobilization of the army is kept in perfect order. Each army corps, except the Guards, is assigned to a particular province. The province is divided into divisional districts, which are again subdivided so that each brigade, regiment and battalion has its own district, from which it draws its recruits both in peace and war. A register is kept of every man available for military duty, and in time of peace every officer knows just what part he is to perform the minute mobilization is decreed, and each soldier knows where he is to report for duty. The secret of the efficiency of the German military system lies in the division of responsibility, and the thorough decentralization, by which every man, from the monarch to the private soldier, has his own especial part to perform.
In 1866 the active army, on a war footing, comprised nine army corps, and aggregated 335,000 men. Each corps consisted of twenty-four battalions of infantry, sixteen batteries of artillery, twenty-four squadrons of cavalry, one battalion of rifles, one battalion of engineers, an engineer train, and a military train conveying ammunition and subsistence, quartermaster’s and hospital supplies. Each infantry battalion numbered 1,000 men. Three battalions formed a regiment, two regiments a brigade, and two brigades a division. Each battery contained six guns. Four batteries were assigned to each infantry division, two batteries of horse artillery were attached to the cavalry division, and four batteries of field and two of horse artillery constituted the reserve artillery of each corps. Each squadron of cavalry numbered about 140 sabres. Four squadrons composed a regiment, two regiments a brigade, two brigades a division. A regiment of cavalry was attached to each infantry division. Each corps numbered about 31,000 combatants, except the Guards, which numbered 36,000—having four additional battalions and eight additional squadrons. During the campaign under consideration, the cavalry of an army corps consisted of only one regiment to each division of infantry; the cavalry division being taken from each corps, and merged into the corps of reserve cavalry.
The depot troops consisted of a battalion for each regiment of infantry, a squadron for each regiment of cavalry, an abtheilung [3 or 4 batteries] for the artillery of each corps, and a company for each rifle battalion, engineer battalion and train battalion. The army in the field was constantly kept up to a full war strength by men drawn from the depots. The fortresses were garrisoned by Landwehr; and on troops of the same class devolved the duty of pushing forward to occupy invaded territory, and to relieve the active army from the necessity of leaving detachments to guard its communications.
This is a brief outline of the organization that enabled a nation of less than 20,000,000 people eventually to bring 600,000 soldiers upon the theatre of war, and to place a quarter of a million of them upon the decisive field of Königgrätz.
The Austrian regular army, when placed upon its war footing, numbered about 384,000 men; and by calling out all of the reserve, this force could be raised to a formidable total of 700,000. But in organization and system of recruitment the Austrian army was inferior to its antagonist, notwithstanding its war experience in 1849 and in the struggle with France and Italy ten years later. The superb system by which Prussia was enabled to send forth a steady stream of trained soldiers to replace the losses of battle was wanting in Austria; and the machinery of military administration seemed deranged by the effort required to place the first gigantic armies in the field. The difference between the two military systems is shown in a striking manner by the fact that the mobilization of the Prussian army of 490,000 men, decreed early in May, was completed in fourteen days, and by the 5th of June 325,000 were massed on the hostile frontiers; while the mobilization of the Austrian army, begun ten weeks earlier than that of Prussia, was far from complete on that date.
Nor was the superiority of the Prussian to the Austrian army, as a collective body, greater than the individual superiority of the Prussian soldier to his antagonist. As a result of the admirable Prussian school system, every Prussian soldier was an educated man. Baron Stoffel, the French military attaché at Berlin from 1866 to 1870, says: “‘When,’ said the Prussian officers, ‘our men came in contact with the Austrian prisoners, and on speaking to them found that they hardly knew their right hand from their left, there was not one who did not look upon himself as a god in comparison with such ignorant beings, and this conviction increased our strength tenfold.’”
The Prussian army was the first that ever took the field armed entirely with breech-loading firearms. In the War of Secession a portion of the Federal troops were, towards the end of the struggle, armed with breech-loading rifles; but now the entire Prussian army marched forth with breech-loaders, to battle against an army which still retained the muzzle-loading rifle. Great as was the superiority of the needle gun over the Austrian musket, it would seem but a sorry weapon at the present day. The breech mechanism was clumsy, the cartridge case was made of paper, the accuracy of the rifle did not extend beyond 300 yards, and its extreme range was scarcely more than twice that distance. Yet this rifle was the best infantry weapon of the time, and it contributed greatly to the success of the Prussians. The Prussian artillery was armed mainly with steel breech-loading rifled guns. These guns were classed as 6-pounders and 4-pounders, though the larger piece fired a shell weighing 15 lbs., and the smaller one used a similar projectile weighing 9 lbs.1 Shell fire seems to have been exclusively used, and the shells to have been uniformly provided with percussion fuses.
In the Austrian army the artillery was provided with bronze muzzle-loading rifled guns, classified as 8-pdrs. and 4-pdrs. The infantry was armed with the muzzle-loading Lorenz rifle.
The German allies of Austria could place about 150,000 men in the field; Italy, about 200,000.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL SITUATION
The
These guns were classed, not according to the weight of the projectile, but according to the diameter of the bore. Thus the gun firing a 15-lb. shell was rated as a 6-pdr., because the diameter of its bore was the same as that of a 6-pdr. smooth-bore gun.