The Times Great Military Lives: Leadership and Courage – from Waterloo to the Falklands in Obituaries. Ian Brunskill
with the others. He called science to his aid. The military field telegraph was instituted and each column could communicate in a few seconds with the others, though a hundred miles distant, and tell exactly the hostile forces in its front.
Aided thus, Moltke perfected plans by which the army of Prince Frederick Charles, joined with that of Herwarth, burst into Bohemia through Saxony, swept away the detachments left to bar their progress, and threatened the flank and rear of the main force with which Benedek hoped to check the Crown Prince. The latter, fighting hard, pushed his way through the Silesian hills. His breech-loaders swept away the badly-armed Austrian columns opposed to him, and Benedek, thus assailed and threatened, fell back perforce to a rearward position on the Bistritz. Once through the mountains, the junction of the Crown Prince with Prince Frederick Charles was assured, and on the night of the 1st of July their horsemen communicated with each other near Gitschin. The next day the King, with Moltke, arrived at Gitschin. Prince Frederick Charles felt the Austrian army on the Bistritz, and, fearing that it might retreat beyond the Elbe, determined to attack and hold it fast till the Crown Prince could come up within striking distance and smite it heavily in flank and rear. The consent of the King, by Moltke’s advice, was given to this bold but wise view of Prince Frederick Charles. The battle of Königgrätz was the result, where the Austrian army was so utterly defeated that Benedek telegraphed immediately to his Sovereign, ‘Sire, you must make peace.’
An armistice was then agreed upon, and the Peace of Prague definitely concluded on the 23d of August. At the close of the war Moltke wrote, ‘It is beautiful when God gives to man such a result to his life as He has vouchsafed to the King and many of his Generals. I am now 66 years old and for my work I received much reward. We have made a campaign which for Prussia, for Germany, and the world is of inestimable importance.’ But there was a great sorrow in store for the General. In December, 1866, Madame von Moltke fell ill, and Christmas Eve, which brings gladness to so many hearts, was sad to Moltke. Before the dawn of Christmas Day his wife lay dead. They had had no children, and his life would have been very lonely had not the kindly King appointed his nephew, Lieutenant von Burt, to be his permanent aide-de-camp; his only surviving sister, Madame von Burt, took charge of his house, and thus he was not left quite alone. But he ever cherished a most lasting and tender affection for his wife. She was buried on his property in Silesia, and whenever the General went home from Berlin his first action was to visit her grave.
But there was hard work to distract his mind from private sorrow. The main results of the war of 1866 were the formation of the new North German Confederation, under the Sovereign of Prussia, and the disappearance of Austria as a Germanic Power. The Treaty of Prague was, however, but the stepping-stone, not the keystone, of German unity. North Germany was, indeed, linked with Prussia, which now held the command of the German forces and the power of peace and war north of the Main. The treaties with Baden and Wurtemberg were of the same tenor. On account of the representations of the Emperor of the French, Saxony was not so completely absorbed into the union. The Saxon King retained the power of nominating his civil and military officers, and the Saxon army was not merged in that of the Confederation. France, by an attitude of desire to interfere in the internal arrangements of Germany, facilitated the conclusion of those treaties; and the fact that on the 6th of August, 1866, she demanded the fortress of Mainz from Prussia under threat of war, though known to but few, had doubtless an important effect.
Moltke’s answer to the demand was the rapid march of 60,000 men to the Rhine; and when it was seen that Prussia was resolute, the threat was not carried out, but an excuse made that the demand was wrung from the Emperor while suffering from severe illness. But those who looked below the surface saw that France was brooding, and pushing forward armaments and military organization. Moltke well knew this. His system of intelligence from France was excellent; every change in armament and every movement of battalions was known to him. The war which he had long foreseen broke out, indeed, suddenly, but found him prepared. In England it caused great surprise, although in the spring of 1870 French agents were abroad in all our southern counties buying corn and forage. The excuses for enormous purchases of this description were that the season had been so dry that no harvest was expected in France. But these excuses were transparent, for had forage been so very scarce in France French dealers would not have cared, simultaneously with an enormous rise in the price of forage, to largely export horses to France.
At the same time, a flotilla was secretly collected in the northern French ports, capable of transporting 40,000 men and 12,000 horses. These things were carefully noted by Moltke’s agents, but the British Government, against which the arrangements might have been equally directed, remained in happy ignorance of any danger of war, and within a few hours of the outbreak of hostilities our Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, as he himself stated in Parliament, ‘believed that there was not a cloud on the political horizon of Europe.’
Careful precautions were taken on the Prussian side, and already in December, 1867, Moltke worked out and laid before the King a plan for the railway transport of the armies of Germany to the Rhine and a plan of campaign against France. So carefully were the details of the transport arranged that when war broke out more than two years afterwards they had hardly to be altered. The key of Moltke’s plan of campaign as exposed in his history of this war which was published from the office of the German staff in 1874, was ‘to find the main body of the enemy and to attack it wherever found.’ The mobilization of the army was prepared in every detail, and Moltke, with a keen but bold strategy, fixed the point of concentration in the Bavarian palatinate, between the Rhine and the Moselle. The assembly of the whole German force here protected the upper as well as the lower Rhine, and allowed for an offensive movement into France which would probably prevent any invasion of German territory.
It might appear hazardous to concentrate the armies on the French side of the Rhine, where they might be attacked before they were united, but his calculations were so perfect and his arrangements so complete, that under his magician’s hand this danger disappeared. For every detachment, the day and hour of its departure from its garrison and arrival near the frontier was laid down. On the 10th day after mobilization was ordered, the first troops would descend from their railway carriages close by the French frontier, and on the 13th day 60,000 combatants would be there in position and on the 18th day this force would be swelled to 300,000 men. He calculated that only on the eighth day, in most favourable circumstances, could the French cross the frontier with 150,000 men, when there was time for the Prussian staff to stop their railway transport at the Rhine and there disembark their forces. To move from the frontier at Saarlouis to the Rhine the French would require at least six marches, and could only reach the river on the 14th day to find the passages occupied by overwhelming German forces. For on the German side there were ready to take the field, as soon as their rapid mobilization was complete, the 12 corps of the North German Confederation, mustering at least 360,000 men; and the armies of Bavaria, Würtemberg, Darmstadt, Saxony and Baden, which were under the supreme command of the King of Prussia in virtue of the treaties concluded after the campaign of 1866, raised the field forces of that Sovereign to over 500,000 combatants.
The German soldier was more suitably equipped for European war than the French. Discarding the cumbrous equipage necessary for the formation of camps or the refinements of cooking, the German troops were prepared during a campaign to trust to the shelter which villages nearly always afford in Western Europe, or, in case of necessity, to bivouac in the open air, while a small mess-tin carried by each soldier sufficed for his culinary wants. The French soldier, on the contrary, was weighed down with tentes d’abri, heavy cooking apparatus, and an enormous kit. These were generally useless, frequently lost, always incumbrances; but an army accustomed to African or Asiatic war clings pertinaciously to the idea of canvas covering, fails to realize the different conditions under which campaigns must be conducted in Europe, and shudders at the idea of an exposure in war to which every true sportsman will willingly consent for pleasure.
The plans matured in peace by Moltke were now to be tested. They were not found wanting. Late at night, on the 15th of July, the King of Prussia ordered the mobilization of the whole German army. The 16th was the first day of mobilization; on the 26th the mobilization was complete; and on the 3d of August three army corps stood formed in order of battle south of the Moselle, between the Saar and the Rhine, and ready to advance into France. While the German army was being mobilized the