Other than that everything is in the usual confusion. The lack of information about the army organization, plus the nonsense which comes to light begins to be discussed in public. Now they have called on Roon in order to brood further on the project that he came up with in Posen. But he has a difficult problem to solve. He will be expected to patch whereas it really needs a complete break with the old system. Now let God help him. The army is at present in the moulting stage. I believe it would cause unbelievable difficulties if one had to organize it to be able to march.41
A series of difficult commission meetings then took place at which field marshals and full generals participated. One, old ‘Papa Wrangel’, Field Marshall Friedrich Count von Wrangel, though 75, had not retired like his younger colleague von Brandt. He attended the meetings and on 4 November told Roon in a very emotional conversation that he wanted to see von Roon appointed Minister of War:
I must be Minister of War. I was a firm character, he saw that in the debates … I am the only one who can carry out the reorganization and he had recommended my nomination to the All-Highest gentleman in the most urgent possible terms etc. etc.42
On 29 November 1859 the Prince Regent appointed Albrecht von Roon Minister of War. The official order was dated 5 December. At 56 years old Roon was the most junior Lieutenant General in the Prussian Army. At the formal audience on 4 December, before the official announcement of the appointment, he asked the Prince Regent urgently to reconsider, ‘if he ought not to find a useful man who had his confidence with a more correct constitutional perfume’. Von Bonin had earned the hatred of conservatives because of his ‘craving for popularity and his flirtation with liberalism during his earlier tenure (1852–54) as Minister of War’.43 Roon’s first appearance in his new role created an unfavourable impression on the members of the Prussian Landtag and evoked a variety of comments that he was ‘austere’, ‘as if dressed in stiff iron plates’, had a face of grim severity’ and above all was a ‘reactionary’.44 Nobody accused him of being too soft.
The other side of Roon comes out clearly in his correspondence with his friend Clemens Theodor Perthes, a remarkable professor of civil law at the university of Bonn and a founder of the Christian Union for the Inner Mission in 1855 as well as the founder of the first hostel in Bonn for young workers.45 Deeply Lutheran, he was also deeply political. He knew almost everybody who counted in Prussian society (the Perthes family owned a distinguished publishing business) and his Christianity never blinded him to the human characteristics of his acquaintances. Roon and Perthes enjoyed an intimate bond that held their friendship stable, even as their stations in life became very different. Perthes, though younger, acted as a kind of confessor to whom Roon confided his thoughts and doubts. Perthes distrusted Bismarck and frequently warned his friend Albrecht von Roon about him. Early in December 1859, Perthes wrote a remarkably prophetic letter to the new Minister of War, warning him not to be too reactionary and advising him to be clear that the Kreuzzeitung ultra-conservatives would try to use him and his appointment. He should remember that he had taken on a historic task and not just for the moment:
The state, on which Germany’s fate in the future will depend, should acquire a new basis for its situation in Europe and in its own internal life through you. A piece of history has been entrusted to your hands. You are not merely placed in the present time before the eyes of Prussia, Germany and Europe but have also become a historic man. Who in future will occupy himself with the history of Prussia will not be able to ignore you.46
Dierk Walter points out in his recent book on Prussian army reform that there has never been any serious research on the Roon reforms.47 They have become ‘mythical’. Historians see them as ‘important’ because, without exception, soldiers from the 1860s on and scholars since the 1860s have considered them important. But were they? Even the most modern and standard military histories repeat the old story, as Walter points out,
without even an attempt to try to establish, why an increase of the recruitment quota by 23,000 men, the creation of 49 new regiments and the exclusion of the Landwehr from the field army should have such wide-ranging, qualitative consequences.48
One reason they became important is that William I made them a top priority. On 12 January 1860 the Regent gave an unusual public lecture before the royal Princes and the senior generals in which he discussed the significance of the reforms. Leopold von Gerlach was impressed and found the lecture ‘outstanding … I learned many new facts … The military reform is a great measure, whose importance will more and more become evident.’49 Indeed, the reforms became important because they convinced the King to appoint Albrecht von Roon his Minister of War, and that was really important because Roon had known Bismarck since the latter was a teenager and knew how gifted Bismarck was. Roon constantly urged the King to appoint Bismarck from the first day of his appointment as a minister.
In the second place, the reforms led to a conflict between Crown and Parliament which caused a complete paralysis of the entire government machinery and to generals it seemed to foreshadow Act 2 of the revolutions of 1848. The fear of the Berlin crowd and the memory of the revolutionary unrest—after all, only fourteen years earlier and very well remembered at court and in the army—served as the backdrop to the crisis of 1859–62. In that atmosphere, Roon’s constant advocacy of Bismarck became more urgent and irresistible. Bismarck became Minister-President because of the reform programme and the deadlock that financing it created. Roon exercised this power because as a Prussian general and Minister of War he was not bound by the Cabinet Order of September 1852 to consult the Minister-President before requesting an audience with the King. He had, as did other commanding generals, an ‘immediate’ position. No intermediary could interrupt a Prussian general’s access to his commanding officer, the King.
Roon’s reforms were, of course, important for military reasons. They increased the size of the active army and active reserves by more than 50 per cent and insured that the larger army would be better trained. They established the doctrine that it took three years of active duty to turn a civilian into a Prussian soldier, a matter which aroused parliamentary opposition from 1859 to the outbreak of the First World War. They reduced the traditional militia reserves, which angered the reserve officers and much of the patriotic bourgeoisie. They raised the annual costs of the army but above all they engaged the Crown and Parliament on an issue which went to the heart of Prussian identity: was the army a royal army or what some called a parliamentary army?
The reforms mattered also because the King cared. Of the Hohenzollern monarchs after Frederick the Great, William was the most committed soldier. He saw himself not only as a commander but as a thinker who had general ideas on the future of the army. In 1832 he wrote several long memoranda on the need for three-year service in order to transform a ‘trained peasant into a proper soldier’. The third year made a real difference in creating the Soldatengeist or ‘military spirit’ which in troubled times protected authority. A wave of revolutionary outbreaks had shaken Europe in 1830 and 1831 which made the Prince’s reflections more relevant. As he wrote to Karl Georg von Hake, Minister of War under Frederick William III,50 on 9 April 1832:
The tendency of revolutionary and liberal parties in Europe is bit by bit to tear down all the supports, which guarantee the Sovereign’s power and respect and thus assure him security in time of danger. That the armies are the chief of these supports is natural. The more a true military spirit infuses the army, the more difficult it will be to get around it. Discipline, blind obedience, are things which only through long habit can be created, so that in the moment of danger, the Monarch can rely on his troops.51
The lessons of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau had been forgotten. The soldier Prince wanted to return to the obedience of the corpse as the only way to preserve his absolute rights as a monarch. If the military has to fire on its fellow citizens, too much thinking can only weaken their ability to do that.
Pri
nce William—rather naively—never reckoned with the hostile reaction which the draft bill received when Roon presented it in February 1860. The liberals in parliament were horrified. Here was a huge increase in the budget to create an army which would be quite explicitly a bulwark against parliament and the growth of representative institutions. After a compromise in 1860 in which moderate liberals agreed to pass the army estimates, the parliament simply refused to approve the Roon expansion and voted against all the measures that might finance it. Crown and parliament locked horns and neither side would yield.
While Roon took his place in the Ministry of War, Bismarck waited for something to happen. He could not return to Petersburg nor get a straight answer about his future. On 21 January 1860 Legationsrat von Zschock, a Prussian diplomat in Stuttgart, wrote to Max Duncker, a leading Liberal and a professor of history,
Since yesterday the rumour has spread that Herr von Bismarck is to become foreign minister in place of Herr von Schleinitz who will in turn replace Bernstorff in London … The name Bismarck has a repellent sound not only in the ears of all German governments so that the name alone—as Minister Hügel once said to me—is not only enough to effect a split between Prussia and its previous allies, but the name is at the same time—be it right or wrong—a cause of profound hatred in the depth of the soul of every friend of Prussia …52
Bismarck, idling in furious impatience, wrote an intemperate and bellicose letter to Moritz von Blanckenburg on 12 February 1860:
Russia concedes little to us, England nothing, but Austria and the Ultramontanes are worse for us than the French. France will often be our enemy out of insolence and lack of restraint but it can at least live without fighting us. But Austria and her allies,—Reichensperger53 [a leading Catholic lawyer and politician—JS]—can only flourish on a field where Prussia has been ploughed under as fertilizer. To cling to the Slavic-Romanic mixed state on the Danube and to whore with Pope and Kaiser is just as treasonable against Prussia and the Lutheran faith, indeed against Germany, as the most vile and open Rhenish confederation. The most we can lose to France is provinces and that only temporarily; to Austria the whole of Prussia and for all time.54
February turned into March. March passed as did April, and still Bismarck had to wait in Berlin until his royal master made up his mind. On 7 May he wrote to Johanna from Berlin,
I sit here and the wheel of time has forgotten me like Red Beard in Kyffhäuser. After three days of vain efforts I finally ran into Schleinitz by chance at dinner at Rederns … I explained rather drily that I would rather quit than continue this life of hanging about and worrying in suspended anxiety. He urged me then to be calm ‘for a few more days’ and made unclear references to undefined alterations.55
During Bismarck’s enforced idleness at Berlin, he and Moritz von Blanckenburg, his childhood friend, met Roon regularly to discuss the business of the new Minister. As Waldemar von Roon, Albrecht’s son and biographer explained, his father sought Bismarck’s advice, and since Bismarck was ‘intimately tied to Moritz von Blankenburg, chief of the Conservative Party in the Landtag, as was Roon himself’, Bismarck ‘lost no occasion’ when he was in Berlin to consult ‘his older friend after Roon had become minister, and in the long conversations that the three had together a growing agreement of political views began to establish itself’.56 Roon needed all the help he could get in the beginning of his career as Minister, for he came under attack from the liberals in Parliament, for whom he was too reactionary, and from reactionaries in the army, for whom he was too moderate. Of these the most persistent and best connected to the King was General Edwin von Manteuffel.
Edwin von Manteuffel (1809–85) deserves a biography at least as much as Moltke and Roon; indeed Manteuffel created the triumvirate of general officers which shaped Prussian German military affairs until 1918. Unlike Roon or Bismarck, Manteuffel belonged to an immensely distinguished family with many branches and dozens of famous soldiers and statesmen among his ancestors. Yet his own family circumstances were inglorious. His branch had little money, and he suffered from a delicate constitution. He was nearsighted, and in spite of his name had few contacts in higher circles.57 His cousin, Otto, we have met as the Prussian Minister-President from 1850 to the New Era, who protected and promoted Bismarck. Edwin, unlike his dour and reserved cousin, had a flair for drama and knew thousands of lines of his beloved Schiller by heart. Gordon Craig describes him as an ‘incurable romantic’.58 He served in the extremely posh Dragoon Guards as a young officer, attended the War Academy, held a variety of commands and came to the attention of Frederick William IV and the camarilla. During 1848 and afterwards, the King used this reliable officer on special diplomatic missions. In the 1840s Manteuffel went to the lectures of the famous historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and became a devoted disciple of the new scientific history which Ranke taught. Ranke reflected years later on Manteuffel and said, ‘He had more understanding of my writings and a greater spiritual sympathy than was granted to me elsewhere in the world.’59
Manteuffel took his most important post in early 1857 when Frederick William IV named him Chief of the Section for Personnel Affairs in the Ministry of War. Even before Bismarck came to power, Manteuffel had arranged the transfer of the office from control of the Minister of War to the personal headquarters of the King, where the title became Chief of the Military Cabinet. This was done on 18 January 1861, when King William I issued ‘a notable, if momentarily unappreciated, cabinet order that henceforth army orders deciding personnel, service details or matters of command would not require ministerial countersignature …’60 The Chief of the Military Cabinet, in effect, became solely responsible to the King for making suggestions for the assignment of officers of all ranks to their posts. Thirty years later General von Schweinitz reflected bitterly on this development and the way a successor to Manteuffel, General Emil von Albedyll, exercised an almost invisible dictatorship:
The enormous expansion of the army has made it impossible for the Kaiser to follow careers and to know the personnel as precisely as he used to do, and to regulate it as wisely and justly as formerly. The Chief of the Military Cabinet has become in a natural way very powerful and once he had with the help of Bismarck [Manteuffel did it before Bismarck—JS] made himself independent of the Minister of War who has taken an oath to the constitution, General Albedyll has become the second most powerful man in the land. For in our people there are very few families of the upper class who are not represented by a member serving in the army and hence have either something to hope or fear from General Albedyll, the chief of personnel administration.61
The most pernicious effect lay in the distortion of decision making. Moltke, important as he was, had his office in 66 Behrenstrasse; Roon and his successors sat in the Kriegsministerium on the Leipziger Strasse. Manteuffel sat in an antechamber of the royal palace and as Adjutant-General he saw the King daily in the normal course of his duties. In a semi-autocratic state like the Kingdom of Prussia, the fact of proximity trumped all other facts. After Roon and Moltke had withdrawn to their offices, the head of the Military Cabinet could listen to the Sovereign’s reactions, help him draft his replies, and gently colour the royal response on broad policy matters. The Militärkabinet grew steadily in power and authority until finally on 8 March 1883 the Emperor removed the institution from the rank list of the Ministry, as an official newspaper reported:
This regulation should come to expression in the rank list of the army in such a way that in future under the ‘Adjutancy of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor and King’ the entire Military Cabinet will be listed, whereas under the rank lists of the Ministry of War, a listing of such names shall henceforth cease and the rubric will simply say: ‘See Military Cabinet’.62
Manteuffel started the process that led inexorably to a Hobbesian war of all against all in the German high command, and since under Stosch the new Imperial Navy adopted the structure of its older model, the Prussian Army, the chaos soon settled in at the
naval headquarters as well. Thus, the centralization and efficiency that Moltke achieved in 1866 and 1870 never occurred again, and that was Manteuffel’s legacy. More immediately he made Roon’s life difficult by ever more intransigent statements about the conflict between the Ministry of War and parliament. On 10 March 1860, Manteuffel wrote to Roon that ‘the unconditional maintenance of the Military Cabinet, particularly at the present moment, is a necessity.’63 The next day he wrote again to strengthen Roon’s resistance:
When a question of principle arises, all the world counsels concession and compromise and advises against bringing matters to a head, and that when this or that minister has acted upon the rules of prudence and the momentary emergency has passed, then everyone says, ‘how could he have given in like that?’64
The new regiments promised in Roon’s plan should be established right away, whether or not parliament had conceded the necessary funds. On 29 May 1860 Manteuffel wrote to Roon to make it absolutely clear where he—and by implication the Prince Regent—stood on this issue:
I consider the state of the army morale and its inner energy imperilled and the position of the Prince Regent compromised if these regiments are not established definitively at once.65
On the other hand, Roon, Moltke, and later Bismarck all needed Manteuffel’s help and support. He shared their ends, disagreeing only on means and on style. Manteuffel played a crucial part in convincing the Prince Regent to appoint Moltke as Chief of the General Staff and to give him wide powers. Nor was Manteuffel as reactionary as some of his utterances in the 1860s suggest. When in 1879 he became Governor-General of Alsace, a post which reported directly to the Emperor, he went out of his way to promote and encourage Alsatian personnel. He went to great pains to reconcile these unwilling German subjects with their fate.66 The problem that Manteuffel posed for Roon in 1860 arose from his flamboyant temperament, his direct access to the King, his position in the palace, his brilliance and literary flair, and the fact that he had become a general and hence beyond the control of Bismarck, a mere civilian. As early as December 1857 Bismarck complained to Leopold von Gerlach about his treatment by Edwin von Manteuffel, who spoke to him ‘as a teacher gives instruction to a child … Edwin’s behaviour to me is … always disapproving and suspicious.’ Too much ‘servility’ has spoiled Edwin: ‘… all the more I need your assurance that this fanatical corporal, this Edwin, did not act on your instructions when recently he treated me as a doubtful political intriguer who had to be got out of Berlin as soon as possible.’67
Bismarck: A Life Page 22
