In spite of his resistance to his assignment Bismarck actually enjoyed St Petersburg very much and the letters have a mellow sense of well-being, which can hardly be found either before or after. His descriptions of the promenades and boulevards of the ‘Venice of the North’ have great charm. He enjoyed watching the oddities of the Russians and wrote at length about the beauties of the palaces, gardens, and parks, the northern light, the colours. The Petersburg letters describe an idyllic intermission in the life of the restless and ambitious genius. Since there was no consular service, Bismarck had a great deal to do as representative of the Prussian King, as he wrote to his brother in May 1859. His main job was to look after the 40,000 Prussians in the Russian Empire: ‘One is lawyer, policeman, district councillor, and claims commissioner for all these people. I often have a hundred documents to sign a day.’16 He enjoyed matching his skills against those of Prince Gorchakov, the Russian foreign minister, and used even the least promising occasions to do so. On 28 April, he wrote to Johanna
Today we funeralled and buried old Prince Hohenlohe with Tsar and Parade. In the black festooned church, after it emptied, I sat with Gortschakov on the black velvet pew with a covering of skulls and we ‘politicked’, that is, worked, not chatted. The preacher had cited the passing of all things in the psalm (grass, wind, dry) and we planned and plotted as if one would never die.17
He reported that the Austrian ‘betrayal’ of 1854–5 had not been forgiven:
One cannot imagine how low the Austrians are here. Not even a scabby dog would accept meat from them … the hatred is beyond measure and exceeds all my expectations. Only since I arrived, have I believed in war. The entire Russian foreign policy has no other aim but to find a way to get even with Austria. Even the calm and gentle Emperor spits fire and rage when he talks about it and the Empress, a princess of Darmstadt, and the Dowager Empress are moving when they talk about the broken heart of the Tsar who loved Franz Joseph like a son …18
One royal relationship in particular gave him a sense of comfort that he himself noted: he was invited to the Peterhof Palace by the Dowager Tsarina, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, widow of the late Tsar Nicholas I, born Princess Charlotte of Prussia, the sister of the late King Frederick William IV. Here is Bismarck’s account
For me she has something in her kindness that is maternal, and I can talk to her as if I had known her from my childhood … I could listen to her deep voice and honest laughter and even her scolding for hours, it was homey. I had come in white tie and cut-away for a formal visit of two hours but toward the end she said she had no desire to say farewell to me and that I must have an awful lot to do. I said in reply, ‘not in the least’ and she said, ‘well then stay until I depart tomorrow’. I accepted the invitation with pleasure as a command, for here it is so delightful and the city of Petersburg is so full of stone and pavement. Imagine the height of Oliva and Zoppot, all bound together in a grand park with a dozen palaces with terraces and fountains and ponds in between, with shaded walks and lawns that run down to the water of the lake, blue sky and warm sun, beyond the sea of tree tops the real sea with gulls and sails, I have not felt so well for ages.19
Is it reading too much into the text to see this as an intimate meeting between the widowed good Queen Mother and the 44-year-old ambassador son? The language of pleasure and well-being has no parallel in the vast correspondence of Bismarck that I have come to know. He felt at home—loved? Sudden ‘elective affinities’ across the generations are not unknown and here we have one. In early July, he saw the Dowager Tsarina again and accompanied her to the ship taking her to Stettin for a holiday in Prussia: ‘It was so enchanting as we escorted the high lady in Peterhof on board, that I had an urge, in uniform as I was and without luggage, to leap on the ship to travel with her.’20 In general Bismarck’s correspondence gives the impression that the Russian royal family took a shine to the brilliant Prussian ambassador. Bismarck claimed in a letter to a colleague that he was the only diplomat allowed in the Imperial family, ‘which gives me the status of an envoy to the family’.21
On the wider European scene, the rumble of war between France and Austria grew louder. During April 1859 the Austrians marched blindly into the trap that Napoleon III and Cavour had set for them. On 20 April the Prince Regent ordered the mobilization of three Prussian Army Corps and the entire line cavalry in preparation for a general European war.22 On 23 April Austria sent an ultimatum to Piedmont-Sardinia to demand that the Piedmontese disarm, which the government of Piedmont rejected on 26 April.23 The following day at the Austrian Crown Council Franz Joseph decided irrevocably for war, calling it ‘a commandment of honor and duty’.24 How sound the Emperor’s judgement may have been can be seen in this letter from Odo Russell to his mother, Lady William, from a few years earlier:
The little Emperor is full of courage and obstinacy! He delights in reviews—and has them at 4 hours notice once or twice a week—much to the disgust of the soldiers and officers in the winter. His Majesty insisted on having a review during the hard frost—he was advised against it, but uselessly—the review was held. Two cuirassiers fell and broke their necks! The Camarilla concealed this event from fear of giving pain to His Majesty. During a review, an anständiger Weisswaschwarenhandlungscommis [a decent employee of a linen and washing powder shop], excited by the sight, passed the Emperor smoking and forgot to take off his hat—he was taken into custody, flogged in prison and condemned to 2 years schweren Kerker [a severe prison sentence]. This created bad blood, of course.25
Under the rule of such an incompetent, absolute monarch, Austria declared war on Piedmont on 29 April, an act of aggression which triggered the Franco-Piedmontese treaty of alliance. The Austrians had had experience of this sort of war before and had smashed the Piedmontese comprehensively in 1848. But Radetzky and Windischgrätz were no longer in command of the Austrian forces in northern Italy. The new military leadership moved too slowly and got caught in heavy rain in the Po Valley. The French army, though much smaller in numbers, had access to railroads and got their forces into place earlier than the Austrians expected. Giuseppe Garibaldi had also organized his nationalist guerrillas into a force called the ‘Hunters of the Alps’, a fast unit which harassed the Austrian flanks. Napoleon III had to work quickly because he could not be sure that the Austrians—as the leading German power—would not mobilize Prussia and the Bund on its side. He knew the Russians would not lift a finger to help Franz Joseph and his government which had betrayed them in 1854. On 20 May French infantry and Sardinian cavalry defeated the Austrian army, which retreated, near Montebello and a week later Garibaldi’s Hunters of the Alps defeated the Austrians at San Fermo and liberated Como. Two big and very bloody battles followed: the Battle of Magenta on 4 June and from 21 to 24 June the Battle of Solferino at which the Franco-Piedmontese Army under Napoleon III defeated an Austrian force under the Emperor Franz Joseph himself. The battle left so many dead and wounded that it moved the Swiss observer Henri Dunant to found the Red Cross.
By this time revolution had broken out in Hungary. The Emperor knew that in this emergency he would not have Russian and Croatian forces to help him suppress the intransigent Magyars and hence had no choice but to sue for peace. On 11 July 1859 he met Napoleon III at Villafranca di Verona in the Veneto. Napoleon III was now in a hurry, because he had lost control of his Italian policy. France had originally planned to take from Austria and give to Piedmont the two northern Italian provinces awarded to Austria in 1815, Lombardy and Venetia. As a result of fighting, the French and Piedmontese had taken Lombardy, but Venetia remained firmly in Austrian hands.26
Cavour resigned as Piedmontese Prime Minister in disgust at Napoleon’s betrayal and in Italy the nationalist forces of various kinds had no intention of letting the Great Powers dictate to them the nature of their glorious revolution. The treaty of Villafranca assumed that Napoleon III would be in a position graciously to restore the Austrian principalities such as the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the
Duchies of Parma and Modena to their legitimate sovereigns but the Bund and the Prussians might intervene too soon to allow him that luxury. He needed to exit the war and quickly.
Bismarck had from the beginning argued that Prussia must stay neutral in the Austro-French war. ‘We are not rich enough to use up our strength in wars that do not earn us anything,’ he argued.27 On 12 May he wrote a long dispatch to the new foreign secretary, Adolph Count von Schleinitz (1807–85) to demonstrate that the Bund must always oppose Prussia, because
this tendency of middle state policy will emerge with the steadiness of a magnetic needle after any temporary swings, because it is no arbitrary product of individual circumstances or persons but a natural and necessary result of the federal relationships of the small states. We have no means to cope with this in a lasting or satisfactory way within the given federal treaties … I see in our relationship to the Bund an infirmity of Prussia, which we shall sooner or later have to heal with ferro et igni.
‘Iron and fire’ was the precursor of the more famous ‘blood and iron’ phrase from his first speech as Minister-President in September 1862. It certainly had the same meaning. Prussia would have to carve out its own fate by ‘iron and fire’, that is, by war. Prussia must use the present Austrian distress to redesign the Bund, send troops to the Austrian border, and threaten to overrun the small states during the war between France and Austria.28
On 14 June 1859 Moltke convened a meeting of all corps commanders and their chiefs of staff to consider an unexpected problem. The Prussian mobilization had failed. By the time of the armistice between France and Austria,
two-thirds of the Prussian army was mobilized and under way, but it was in no position to do anything. What had happened? When the order to mobilize was given, only half the corps were ready to do so. Railroad transportation was ready: war materials—ammunition, food, wagons and supplies—had been collected and stockpiled all over Germany along three railroad lines. But civilian traffic took precedence; troops crawled to the Rhine … Moltke was stunned.29
A complete reorganization of the General Staff followed. A railroad department was set up and the second division of the General Staff, the mobilization section, was created.
Roon wrote to his friend Perthes to complain that
our Prussian pride is headed for another deep humiliation. We have done too much for us now to do nothing … and now we cannot do anything more because without England the risk would be greater than the reward. It is a horrible dilemma. That comes from too much trembling, timidity and hesitation.30
And there was much truth in that charge. Neither the Regent nor his Foreign Minister von Schleinitz could decide what to do. Bismarck—with his usual lack of discretion—had argued for an active, anti-Austrian, and explicitly ‘German’ policy in alliance with the German national movement, now much encouraged by the Italian example. William, the Prince Regent, could not bring himself to break his natural allegiance to the Habsburgs nor to decide to use the occasion to ‘make’ Germany.
Bismarck’s way of influencing policy, as we saw in the previous chapter, had been to write critical letters to the King’s General Adjutant Leopold von Gerlach, who would pass them on to the King during their daily chat over coffee and cakes. Bismarck became more and more influential and Minister-President Manteuffel had played with the idea of making him Foreign Minister in 1856. Now the situation internationally suited Bismarck’s combative style of politics. The ‘national’ question had blown up again and the stakes were higher. Bismarck still wrote letters but, as he explained in his memoirs, they were ‘absolutely fruitless … The only result of my labours was … that suspicion was cast on the accuracy of my reports.’31
By chance Bismarck had returned to Germany in July, this time really ill, because of the treatment a Russian doctor had given to his injured knee.32 He needed to be there and the illness gave him the excuse. While he suffered from a poisoning of the body, rage disturbed his mind; as he wrote to his brother from Berlin in August 1859, ‘I have worked myself into a rage and for three days have not slept and hardly eaten.’33 Late in 1859, Bismarck spent a period of recuperation on the estate of his old Junker friend, Alexander von Below-Hohendorf. Below noted with alarm the dangerous and destructive power of Bismarck’s terrible rage. In a letter of 7 December 1859 he wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg that Bismarck had become deranged by his concentration on his enemies and ‘extreme thoughts and feelings’. The cure was simple and Christian: ‘love thine enemies!’ This was the best ‘door’ through which to release
the mounting pressures from the darkness of his sick body and the best medicine against the amazing visions and thoughts [Vorstellungen] that threaten to draw him to death.34
This advice made sense. Bismarck’s sick soul needed a release and to his Junker friends that release could be found at any moment through penitence, grace, and the love of God. It was Bismarck’s tragedy—and Germany’s—that he never learned how to be a proper Christian, had no understanding of the virtue of humility, and still less about the interaction of his sick body and sick soul.
Bismarck had been told by doctors in Berlin that ‘my growing hypochondria’ arose from worries about his Berlin existence and the expenses caused by regular dinners with nine people at meals, thirteen domestic servants, and two secretaries. He felt he was ‘being plucked at every corner’.35 This is, I think, the first time that he used the word ‘hypochondria’ about himself, and in time others used it of him. ‘Homelessness’, the absence of his stable family life, made him abnormally anxious.
None of this improved Bismarck’s temper. In late September he wrote to his sister that
Now that I have talked myself hoarse to artisans and statesmen, I have almost gone mad from annoyance, hunger and too much business … The left leg is still weak, swells up when I walk on it, the nerves have yet to recover from the iodine poisoning, I sleep badly … flat and embittered and I don’t know why.36
As we shall see again and again, there is a ‘why’. The Prince Regent had rejected him and his advice. Not for the last time Bismarck plunged into a deep despair when his royal master showed displeasure or simply failed to pay sufficient attention to him. A little attention would usually cheer him up and in this case it came from the command to wait upon the Tsar, who had visited Poland to do some serious hunting on the vast Polish royal domains. Bismarck, restored to good spirits, wrote to Johanna from the Lazienki Palace in Warsaw on 19 October:
The whole day ‘en grandeur’ with Tsar Alexander II … I can only tell you in plain words that I am very well. Breakfast with the Emperor, then audience, exactly as gracious as in Petersburg. Visits, dinners with his Majesty, evening theatre, really good ballet and the boxes full of pretty women. Now I have just slept splendidly. Tea stands on the table and as soon as I have drunk it, I shall go out. The aforesaid tea consisted of not only tea but coffee, six eggs, 3 sorts of meat, baked goods, and a bottle of Bordeaux … very comfortable.37
Recognition from the All-Highest authority and lots of food did wonders for Bismarck’s disposition.
On 23 and 24 October a Russo-Prussian summit of the sovereigns took place in Breslau and the Prince Regent had ordered Roon to attend it where he met ‘Otto Bismarck’, who had ‘very serious doubts about the affair’,38 presumably the army reform. The letter does not make clear what the subject of the doubts were, but the next letter, a few days later, makes very clear how unpleasant the whole reform project had become for Roon personally:
How much jealousy and misinterpretation my involvement has aroused even in men who like Steinmetz deserve my respect and recognition. It came to a painful, almost emotional scene. We separated in peace but I had poison in my blood and struggled for a long time to regain my balance.39
Roon had objectively a difficult position. He had been asked to chair a commission as deputy to the Minister of War on which he was by far the most junior officer, no insignificant matter in a military organization. Retired General Heinric
h von Brandt (1789–1868), one of the most distinguished military theorists of the previous generation of soldiers, that is, those who fought in the Napoleonic War, watched Roon’s difficulty from the detachment of one who had seen it all before. He had written the classic study on tactics, which had just been reissued in 1859 and had been translated into several foreign languages.40 Brandt’s most gifted and devoted pupil was the 41-year-old Major Albrecht von Stosch, later like Schleinitz to become one of Bismarck’s ‘enemies’. He and his former commander, General von Brandt, carried on a private correspondence of remarkable frankness and interest. General von Brandt reported to Stosch on 19 October 1859 what he had heard in Berlin about army reform:
Bismarck: A Life Page 21
