Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Luckily for Bismarck the Minister of War, Albrecht von Roon, never wavered in his support of his friend. In turn Bismarck trusted Roon enough to send him military suggestions, though often with the appropriate apology for ‘these reflections from a major’.111 This relationship of mutual trust between Roon and Bismarck must have been the only calculable element in Bismarck’s unstable situation of complex and contrasting forces. Bismarck needed Roon, because, as a civilian, he had no power over the course of events once fighting began. Roon could do what Bismarck could not. As a senior officer and Minister of War, Roon was the only member of the State Ministry not bound by the Cabinet Order of 8 September 1852, and could ask for an audience of the King at any time. Roon’s Immediatstellung, that is, the right to see his Commanding Officer, the King, on request, represented Bismarck’s only means to intervene in matters of command. At this stage, he had not yet become the great Bismarck and was not even ‘a major’ in more than name. Roon’s unswerving loyalty and constant access to the King constituted the invisible basis on which Bismarck had to operate.

  Fighting began on 1 February 1864 when Prussian forces crossed the border into Schleswig. Field Marshall Wrangel issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of the Duchy of Schleswig, to say ‘We come to protect your rights. These rights are violated by the common Constitution for Denmark and Schleswig.’112 At this point, the Prussians had a stroke of luck. The morning of 4 February brought very cold weather which froze the waters of the Schlei and the surrounding marshes which meant that the fortified line of the Dannevirke could be assaulted from the frozen flanks. The Prussians and Austrians assaulted the Dannevirke in early February and forced the Danes to evacuate the line over night and in a snowstorm. The Danes retreated across the water to Jutland and to the fortifications and trenches at Düppel in eastern Schleswig. The Danish retreat without a serious fight was a national disgrace but it was not a substantial victory for the Austro-Prussian expeditionary force either which had nearly twice the number of troops. On 18 February Prussian troops—probably by mistake—crossed the border in Schleswig into Denmark proper and took the town of Kolding. Bismarck hoped to use the incursion to raise the military stakes in the war but the Austrians remained on the Schleswig–Danish border. In effect, the Prussian and Austrian armies had occupied most of Schleswig without serious fighting but what now? Both Roon and Moltke told the King how important a victory of arms would be in political terms.

  ‘In this campaign your Majesty must win some sort of substantial success, in order not only not to lose the respect gained abroad and at home but also raise it to such an extent that we shall be lifted above many difficulties.’ Moltke added: ‘In the present state of the war there is no more important objective than the glory of the Prussian army.’113

  After a week the Austrians and Prussian agreed to push the war into Denmark proper and on 11 March 1864 announced that the Treaties of 1852 no longer bound the two powers. This was a tense period because the invasion of Denmark widened the war and invited the intervention of the Great Powers. The British cabinet discussed an intervention but hesitated to take the step. With France Bismarck took a strong line. If the French intervened, Prussia would halt the Jutland operations completely and make common cause with Austria against France. ‘From the moment that you show us faccia feroce, we must put ourselves on good terms with Austria.’114

  The British government had called a conference in London of the signatories of the Treaties of 1851 and 1852 for 20 April 1864. This increased the pressure on Bismarck and ravaged his nerves. Unless the Prussian army could win some sort of military victory, the Prussian delegation at the conference would have no leverage to achieve a favourable decision from the Great Powers. Luckily, all the Prussian Generals agreed that the army needed a victory. On 18 April 46 companies of Prussian infantry stormed the fortified line at Düppel and after six hours of fierce fighting took the main Danish defence in Schleswig.115 On 24 April 1864, the London Conference began. With the victory at Düppel, the Prussian soldiers had created facts on the ground. Bismarck could now begin to dismantle the restrictions on Prussian freedom in order to move toward annexation. The Austrian and Prussian delegations informed the conference that they no longer considered themselves bound by the London Treaties and suggested a new constitutional arrangement by which the Duchies might be bound to the Danish crown by personal union only. The Danes stubbornly rejected the compromise to the dismay of the Austrians. Meanwhile, on 12 May 1864 a formal armistice began; all troops were to remain in the positions held that day.

  The authentic Bismarckian attitude comes out in a private letter to his former boss in Aachen, Adolf Heinrich Graf von Arnim-Boitzenburg, in which he tells Arnim that he intends to use national popular sentiment against the Danes:

  The present situation is so constituted that it seems to suit our purpose at the conference to let loose against the Danes all the dogs that want to howl (forgive this hunting metaphor); the whole howling pack together has the effect of making it impossible for the foreigners to place the Duchies again under Denmark. The Duchies have up to now played the role of the birthday boy in the German family and have got used to the idea, that we are willing to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of their particularist interests … The address will work against that swindle … for me annexation by Prussia is not the highest and most necessary aim but it would be the most agreeable result.116

  In the midst of the most difficult period of his entire ministry, Bismarck found time to write to Motley in English on 23 May 1864,

  Jack, my dear,

  Where the devil are you and what do you do that you never write a line to me? … Do not forget old friends, neither their wives, as mine wishes nearly as ardently as myself to see you or at least to see as quickly as possible a word in your handwriting. Sei gut und komm oder schreibe! Dein, v. Bismarck.117

  Motley was startled that his friend had written in the midst of an international crisis and answered four days later:

  My dear old Bismarck, It was a very great pleasure to hear from you again. It is from modesty alone that I haven’t written. I thought your time was so taken up with Schleswig-Holstein, and such trifles, that you wouldn’t be able to find a moment to read a line from me.118

  Motley’s reluctance to disturb his old friend in the middle of war makes perfect sense but why did Bismarck write to him? Why did Bismarck need to have his friend’s support and reassurance? There is something mysterious and moving at work here. Bismarck really loved Motley and in this first moment of his world-historical significance, he reached out to him.

  Another tiny episode tells us something important about Bismarck’s role in Prussian affairs. He was a royal servant and even in the midst of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis he remained subject to the King’s whims. On the same day he wrote to Motley he wrote to his cousin Count Theodor von Bismarck-Bohlen to ask for help to carry out a job that the King had dumped on him. The King wanted to mark Field Marshall von Wrangel’s retirement from active duty at the age of 80 by buying for him with royal funds the estate Wrangelsburg in the administrative district of Stralsund, County Greifswald. Since the King, always frugal, wanted to pay a reasonable price, Bismarck, in some embarrassment, asked Theodor, who lived in the district, to make discreet enquiries about the market price of the estate and to act as the go-between if a bid were to be made. As Bismarck explained, ‘forgive me for bothering you with such matters in All-Highest service, but there is no other way to do it.’119 Otto von Bismarck, facing his first really great test, caught between conflicting demands of the great powers, intent on dismantling the Bund and establishing Prussian hegemony in Germany, trying to fend off or at least contain nationalist emotions, uncertain about whether the armistice would hold, has to interrupt these serious considerations to shop for a gift for Wrangel. Nor was Bismarck slack in such matters. No matter how irksome he found it, he conducted the King’s business, great and small, with exemplary efficiency.

  In a letter which Roo
n wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg on 24 May 1864, he summed up how the situation looked to the second-best informed man in the Kingdom:

  Whether I can do something to settle my old nerves this summer depends upon Lord Pam [Palmerston—JS], Louis Napoleon and a few other highly placed rogues. If we strike again, I can hardly go away … it all depends whether Vienna prefers to grant us the Duchies rather than the Augustenburger, for separation from Denmark is no longer in doubt.120

  Rechberg faced exactly that dilemma. The Danes had stubbornly refused the Austro-Prussian proposal for ‘personal union’ of the two Duchies under the Danish crown. Rechberg thus confronted the choice Roon outlined ‘to grant us [the Prussians] the Duchies rather than the Augustenburger’. On 28 May Rechberg suddenly decided to opt for the Augustenburger and the Austrian and Prussian representatives announced at the London Conference their support for ‘the complete separation’ of the Duchies from Denmark ‘and their union in a single state’ under the Duke of Augustenburg who ‘in the eyes of Germany’ had the greatest right to the succession.121

  This was, as we have seen, Bismarck’s least desirable option but he had already considered the Prussian position with the King and the Crown Prince, who—with all due consideration for the claims of young Duke Frederick and ties of family—remained Prussian soldiers and princes. After an exchange of letters between King William and Duke Frederick, the Crown Prince on 26 February 1864 drafted a set of demands which Prussia must put to the Hereditary Duke in a peace settlement:

  Rendsburg to be a federal fortress, Kiel to be a Prussian marine station, accession to the Customs Union, the construction of a canal between the two seas and a military and naval convention with Prussia.122

  Under such conditions Frederick VIII would have been ruler in name only of what would become a Prussian military district. The Crown Prince believed that he would in the end accept them. To test that hypothesis Bismarck invited the Duke to Berlin for a conference.

  While Bismarck prepared to deal with the young Duke, the military clock had begun to tick and on 29 May 1864 Roon with apologies wrote to Bismarck to remind him that ‘he had to do with his truest friend, whose task it is, precisely because of this characteristic, to bring disagreements and conflicts into the open.’123 Roon attached a report in which he complained that the army had become restless about the lengthening armistice and the consequent loss of the gains made by force:

  If a government rests chiefly on the armed portion of the public—and this is our case—so must the opinion of the army about the acts and omissions of that government certainly not be regarded as inconsequential. Thus if both Duchies are not annexed, the annexation of one is essential. If neither is achieved, it will be an inglorious end of the present government in Prussia.124

  31 May 1864 Duke Frederick arrived in Berlin for the conference with Bismarck and Roon wrote to von Blanckenburg to express his worries that Bismarck had given too much ground in London:

  unfortunately, I fear that Otto made too many concession in London and has placed himself on another ground. I think that he had no need to do that because I do not believe in the spectre of a general European war.125

  Bismarck received the Hereditary Duke of Schleswig-Holstein at nine in the evening of 1 June 1864 and the meeting went on for three hours. As he wrote in his memoirs, ‘The expectation of his Royal Highness that the Hereditary Prince would be ready to agree, I did not find justified.’126 Bismarck clearly made the case as strongly as he could and by midnight the Duke realized that whether he accepted or refused the terms would make little difference because Prussia had decided at the very least to turn Schleswig into a Prussian possession in fact, if not in name, and there was little he could do to stop it. In addition to the Crown Prince’s conditions, Bismarck added a few of his own (interestingly not included in his memoirs), that Prussia would require ‘guarantees of a conservative system of government’.127 That in turn would turn the Ducal estates against their Prince and lose him the support of the German liberals and nationalists. He thought he had to refuse such terms and did.128 Bismarck had now eliminated the second option.

  As he boasted a year later to Freiherr von Beust, Prime Minister of Saxony, he had ‘hitched’ the Augustenburg ox to the plough. ‘As soon as the plough was in motion, I unhitched the ox.’129 In fact, he had done nothing of the sort. The Austrians put the Augustenburg solution into the game, and Duke Frederick played into Bismarck’s hands. Had he accepted the Prussian terms, he could have declared whatever he liked once he had assumed power and played German nationalism and liberal parliamentarianism against the most hated man in Germany. Instead, the Prince lamely said, as he took leave of Bismarck at midnight, ‘We shall see each other again, I suppose … I never saw the Hereditary Prince again until the day after the Battle of Sedan …’130 Bismarck played his hand perfectly and in a characteristic way. The sudden Austrian decision to choose the Augustenburg option would have rattled a less skilful gamester. Bismarck accepted the move in order to keep the Austrians in step, assuring himself that the King, Crown Prince, and generals wanted the fruits of their victories and even the dreaded Augusta could not block that. Next he needed to box the Duke into a situation in which he would have to refuse the Prussian offer. What options he would have seen if the Duke had been sly enough to accept the conditions with the intention of double-crossing the Prussians we cannot know but Bismarck would have found them. The Duke’s territories had a large Prussian army on them. Civil servants had begun to introduce Prussian laws, currency, etc. The Duke’s refusal saved Bismarck a lot of bother.

  The elimination of the Augustenburg ox from the field left the third and Bismarck’s preferred option: annexation of the Duchies. By now he had come close to achieving that, since Rechberg had played his last card. The stubborn Hereditary Prince meant that there would be no Augustenburg solution and when the truce expired on 26 June 1864, fighting began again. The British government, having promised to support Denmark, did nothing. Disraeli, speaking for the opposition, skewered the Liberals with his scorn:

  The most we can do is to tell the noble lord what is not our policy. We will not threaten and then refuse to act. We will not lure our allies with expectations we do not fulfil … to announce to the country that we have no allies and then declare that England can never act alone.131

  The resumption of fighting caused a new domestic crisis. On 12 June a full Crown Council met to discuss Danish War finances. Karl Freiherr von Bodelschwingh (1800–73) served as Bismarck’s finance minister in the ‘conflict cabinet’ from 1862 to 1870 and in a collection of ministers that he despised, Bismarck absolutely hated Bodelschwingh. As Helma Brunck puts it, Bodelschwingh ‘was always restricted in his scrupulous attitude by constitutional, legal reservations’.132 Roon put it more concretely in a letter to Moritz von Blanckenburg, ‘Bismarck’s neurotic impatience and Bodelschwingh’s bureaucratic niceties and worries have made sure that not all discords have disappeared.’133 And Bismarck was desperately impatient. The game had reached a moment of the greatest delicacy and at the Crown Council of 12 June 1864, Bodelschwingh reported that to the end May 1864 17 million thaler had been spent, covered by the 1863 surplus of 5,300,000 and the State Treasury reserves of 16 million. More money would be needed but little remained in the treasury. Bismarck demanded that loans be raised without approval of the Chambers but Bodelschwingh and other ministers saw it as a violation of the Constitution of 1850 and the State Debt Law of Frederick William III of 1820. As they declared, ‘As long as the ministers of His Majesty must consider themselves bound by their oaths to maintain the Constitution, it cannot be compatible with the oath to accept a state loan without prior authorization of the Diet.’134 Roon argued fiercely that ‘in the case of an urgent need and in order to continue the war, according to articles 63 and 103 of the Constitution a state loan even without the approval of the Landtag can for provisional use be issued constitutionally with the force of law.’135 Even if that were accepted, it was far from cl
ear whether investors could be found to purchase the obligations of the Prussian Kingdom issued on a doubtful reading of the Constitution. No action could be taken and on 17 July 1864, the King closed the Landtag which had not authorized an additional pfennig of expenditure.

  The summer, as usual, saw Europe’s royalty depart their capitals for their annual visits to take the waters at the spas. For Bismarck, it meant a wandering existence while he waited on the edge of royal familial holidays for the moments of business. The season opened when on 19 June 1864 the King and Bismarck arrived in Carlsbad for a summit with Franz Josef and Rechberg which ended on 24 June 1864. The next day the London Conference adjourned without a decision on the future of the Duchies. The British had done nothing to help their Danish allies, as the French Ambassador contemptuously remarked, ‘they recoiled with vigour’.136 On 27 June Bismarck wrote to his sister that ‘politically things are going so well that it makes me nervous, “pourvu que cela dure”. According to the news today, England will stay peaceful.’137 He had, in fact, pulled off a tremendous coup and knew it.

  And the pieces continued to fall into the right holes. On 8 July the new Danish government gave up the struggle and sued for peace. A week later, von Roon warned Bismarck that, if a trade were to be made to return the occupied Danish islands, it had to be compensated by ‘a complete cession of the Duchies to the Allies to be acceptable’.138 The peace negotiations would take place in Vienna and on the day Bismarck left for the conference, ‘he [the King], very moved, thanked me as I left and credited me with the whole success that God’s support had blessed Prussia. Touch wood!’139 Bismarck arrived in Vienna early in order to consult Rechberg before the Danish peace delegation arrived.140 He had time to visit Motley and his family on the second evening after he arrived. Mary Motley wrote at length in a letter to her daughter about the memorable evening: