Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  by the declarations made to the Bund and through the convocation in the near future of the Holstein estates, Austria has called into question and endangered the sovereign rights of the King of Prussia as co-regent of Schleswig-Holstein … Our Government will respond to the treaty violation with its full energy in defence of its rights.229

  Prussia and Austria now moved toward war. On 9 June Bismarck wrote to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha that only ‘an act of violence’ would solve the German question.230 On the 10th he presented the text to the German states for a new federal constitution, which would exclude Austria, and had a lower house based on universal suffrage. Bavaria and Prussia would share the military command of the new German state231 and on the 11th he engaged Heinrich von Treitschke to draft a manifesto for the King to use to address the nation on the eve of war.232 Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96) had become a kind of popular idol among German professors. He filled every hall in the university. He addressed crowds on public occasions. He wrote plays, poetry, and literary criticism and lectured on recent German history. His sister compared him to an academic Martin Luther. In 1863 he published a pamphlet called ‘Federal State and Unitary State’ which took the Bismarckian line. The little states were all fraudulent creations and the justifications of them by the use of the word ‘organic’ meant nothing. ‘We know that the word “organic” appears in politics as soon as thought ends … Every German federal reform will be an empty phrase as long as Germany’s unnatural ties to Austria continue.’233 He belonged to the small group of German liberals whom Bismarck had converted. As he put it:

  I find it terrible that the most important foreign minister whom Prussia has had for decades should at the same time be the most hated man in Germany. I find it sadder still that the most promising ideas for reforming the Confederation that were ever proposed by a Prussian government should have been met by the nation with such humiliating coldness.234

  Yet when Treitschke actually met Bismarck, he was shocked. After the audience he remarked: ‘Of the moral powers in the world he has not the slightest notion.’235

  The Middle States, as they were called, would not surrender their independence easily. A French traveller in the mid-1860s visited Dresden while it still housed the royal reisdence of a ruling dynasty and wondered at the display of monarchical self-confidence:

  Twenty different signs recall at any moment the proximity of the palace … There are the officers who pass by, with their sabres tucked under their arms, … Then the troops of men in livery who come and go, invariably wearing … the royal crown, which image soon ends up encrusted in your retina unless you take good care.236

  The three dynasties of Hanover, Saxony, and Württemberg had lineages no less impressive than the Hohenzollern and took care to parade them. Bismarck—in one of his very few real miscalculations—overestimated the power of these monarchies and the loyalty of their subjects. Had he known how easily the princes would surrender their sovereignty (Hanover was a stubborn exception), he would never have introduced universal suffrage. The people were not called up because Bismarck had some sort of ‘white revolution’ in mind or because he had bonapartist urges, as many historians assert, but only to balance the princes in order to preserve the absolute power of the Prussian King. By the end of the 1880s Bismarck planned to repeal universal suffrage because the people turned out to be Catholics and Social Democrats, not obsequious peasants. Bismarck fell victim to Burke’s observation that ‘very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions’.

  The first act of war took place on 10 June 1866. Since Austria had unilaterally violated the Convention of Bad Gastein, Prussia now had a right to joint sovereignty of Holstein and Schleswig and Lieutenant General von Manteuffel issued a proclamation to the Holsteiners ‘that to protect the threatened rights of His Majesty the King I am obliged to take in hand the supreme authority in the Duchy of Holstein’.237 Prussian troops heavily outnumbered the Austrians brigades and the Austrian Vice-Regent of Holstein Lieutenant General Ludwig Freiherr von Gablenz (1814–74) issued an order for his troops to withdraw. General Manteuffel allowed them to march out with full honours, drums rolling and flags flying. Bismarck went into one of his notorious rages but he could not issue an order to a Prussian private, let alone a senior and flamboyant character like General Edwin von Manteuffel. He complained to Manteuffel in strong terms and Manteuffel replied equally strongly. Erich Eyck describes what Bismarck then did:

  You say that a violent act would embarrass the mind. I answer you with the words of Deveroux, ‘Freund, jetzt ist’s Zeit zu lärmen’ [now is time to make a din—JS]. Excuse the hasty style of this letter, but your telegram this morning paralysed my nerves, and this is now the reaction. In haste but in old friendship, yours, Bismarck.’ While his pen flew over the paper, he thought of some lines from Schiller’s ‘Wallenstein’s Death’ which expressed his feelings better still. He ordered a copy to be brought to him. He found the lines at the decisive moment when only open rebellion is left to him, and he wrote under his signature:

  Ich tat’s mit Widerstreben,

  Da es in meine Wahl noch war gegeben,

  Notwendigkeit ist da, der Zweifel flieht,

  Jetzt fechte ich für mein Haupt und für mein Leben.

  (Er geht ab, die anderen folgen) Schiller, Wallenstein, Act III, Scene 10 [Lingering irresolute, with fitful fears

  I drew the sword—’twas with an inward strife,

  While yet the choice was mine. The murderous knife is lifted for my heart!

  Doubt disappears! I fight now for my head and for my life.]238

  (He goes off, the others follow)

  Even the critical reader cannot help feeling overwhelmed by this letter. No other statesman would have been able to write a letter of this scope at so critical a time.239

  I suspect that Churchill could easily have done something similar, though it is impressive. What Eyck in spite of his stupendous erudition ignores is how weak Bismarck’s position was in the situation. He could not order Manteuffel to do a thing, only cajole him, persuade him, seduce him with his favourite playwright. Imagine it: the great Bismarck at the single most desperate moment of his career so powerless that his only ally was Schiller. No doubt, as always with Bismarck, there is self-dramatization at work in the episode, but the fact remains that Manteuffel obeyed the King, not Bismarck.

  On 14 June the Prussian delegate in Frankfurt declared that the Constitution of the Bund had been broken and on the next day the Prussian Ministers in Hanover, Dresden, and Hesse-Cassel presented ultimatums to the governments to which they were accredited which demanded a reply by midnight and a complete acceptance of the Prussian proposals.240 Sentiment in Germany was overwhelmingly anti-Prussian. Baron Kübeck wrote to Mensdorff to report that, as Austrian troops left Frankfurt, the citizenry shouted, ‘“Three cheers for Austria! Victory for the Austrian army!” Whereas the Prussian contingent left without ceremony in the morning.’241

  At midnight on the night of 15 June Lord Loftus found himself at a scene of high drama.

  I was with Prince Bismarck on the night of June 15th. We had been walking and sitting in his garden till a later hour, when, to my astonishment, it struck midnight. Bismarck took out his watch and said, ‘At this moment our troops are marching into Hanover, Saxony and the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel. The struggle will be severe. Prussia may lose, but she will, at all events, have fought bravely and honourably. If we are beaten’ Count Bismarck said, I shall not return here. I shall fall in the last charge. One can only die once and, if beaten, it is better to die.’242

  That may seem false and theatrical but Bismarck had reason to be nervous. Informed military opinion then expected Austria to win and several distinguished military historians can show convincingly that they ought to have done so. In spite of Moltke’s calm certainties, he too had reason to worry. He had to divide his forces with an army in the West which would have to deal with the Hanoverian and
Hessian forces, three armies toward the East, one of which would need to subdue the Saxons and the other two had moved into Austrian territory to carry out the encircling movement on which his plans for victory rested. His armies had commanders of varying degrees of quality and equally varying amounts of esteem from the King. Fortunately two of the royal commanders, Prince Frederick Charles, the King’s nephew, and the Crown Prince Frederick proved to be outstanding field commanders. The Austrians had similar problems but with unfortunately reversed consequences. The commander-in-chief of the Austrian ‘North Army’ in Bohemia, Feldzeugmeister Ludwig von Benedek (1804–81), ‘the lion of Solferino’, had gained a reputation for boldness as one of the few Austrian commanders to come out of the 1859 war with credit. ‘The mere name Benedek means that he will come quickly, dealing blows left and right,’ Moltke said.243 Had he done so and caught the Prussian columns one by one, the outcome would have been different, but Benedek, who had done so well as corps commander, proved unable to control an entire army and hesitated at several crucial points. Whereas Moltke had to let the mediocre Eduard Vogel von Fackenstein command the West army because the King liked him, he had good commanders in Bohemia. Franz Joseph chose an obscure, near-sighted Archduke, the Archduke Albrecht, to command the Austrian ‘South Army’, who proved to be an outstanding and versatile commander. Aided by an accomplished chief of staff, a competent bourgeois officer, Franz John, the Archduke Albrecht achieved victory over the Italians.244

  Moltke faced another threat which he could not control: the problem of communications. The railroads made it possible to move large numbers of men and the telegraph made control of such movements significantly easier. In effect strategic mobility had greatly improved but once away from the railhead and especially in battle commanders had no way to contact each other. Moltke frequently had no idea where his troops were and no way of finding out. The age of the mobile telephone has so spoiled us that we tend to forget how impossible communications were for most of the nineteenth century.

  ‘Weaponry was the basic evil’, claims Frank Zimmer. The Prussian ‘needle gun’ was much superior to the Austria ‘Lorenz’ gun.

  That the Austrian Army set its hopes on an obsolete model must rank as one of the most disastrous miscalculations in the history of the armaments industry … The Prussian model was simply the best. Oddly enough its very virtues made it suspect in Austrian eyes and a reason not to adopt it. Kaiser Franz Joseph and many officers thought that its rapid fire power would mislead the ordinary soldier into wasting ammunition.245

  Gordon Craig adds: ‘the Zündnagelgewehr … [was] a breech-loading rifle that was capable of firing five rounds a minute with 43 percent accuracy at seven hundred paces’ and quotes ‘the plaintive cry in the letter of an Austria Landser, “Dear Peppi, I guess I won’t see you anymore for the Prussians are shooting everyone dead”.’246 In the main engagement the Austrians lost three times as many men on average as the Prussians. The Austrian tactics of bayonet charge simply made certain that, as General von Blumenthal, Chief of Staff of the Prussian I Army, put it, ‘we just shoot the poor sods dead.’247

  Both Bismarck and Moltke had become desperate. Their generals moved in a relaxed manner to their tasks. In exasperation Bismarck asked Roon on 17 June, ‘Is Manteuffel in Harburg nailed down by any sort of military order? I hoped, he would fly.’248 Vogel von Falckenstein was worse. He had settled into the comfortable Hotel Zur Krone in Göttingen and seemed to be taking his time in dispatching the small and ill-organized Hanoverian army. He had a reputation for eccentricity and had once court-martialled a soldier for presenting him a glass of water without the serving tray.249 Moltke saw that his plan made the Prussian forces terribly vulnerable, deployed in relatively small contingents across hundred of kilometres, as one critic put it, ‘like beads on a string’.250

  After the war Stosch complained that many commanders had been too old and lacked inventiveness but the General Staff was

  fresh, active and, what was best of all, did not stick to formalities but to substance. General von Moltke is one of the most talented and sharp-thinking of generals and has the inclination to grand operations … There is a story that during the difficult hours at Königgrätz somebody asked Moltke what he had decided about retreat to which Moltke answered, ‘here it is a question of the entire future of Prussia, here there will be no retreat.’251

  If Benedek, who enjoyed the advantage of compactness, had launched an attack on the First Army alone before it combined with the two columns of the Elbe and Second Armies, the whole plan would have collapsed. If the Hanoverians or Saxons had fought more tenaciously then the West Army under Vogel and the Elbe Army under Karl Herwarth von Bittenfeld, who, as Wawro writes, ‘vied with Falckenstein for the distinction of most mediocre general in the Prussian army’, would not have arrived in time to join the other two columns.252 On 28 June General Vogel von Falckenstein and the Prussian Army of the Main defeated the Hanoverian army at Langensalza and Hanover capitulated. The first defeat prompted Franz Joseph to change his ministers. On 30 June a new government, the ‘Three Counts’ government—Belcredi, Esterhazy, and Mendsdorff—was formed in Vienna, which promised to be more resolute.

  On 30 June the King moved the Great Headquarters to Jicin in Bohemia, where Moltke discovered to his dismay that all three Army groups had lost complete contact with Benedek’s North Army and had no idea where it was. Time was running out because a French envoy was expected to arrive at headquarters with a demand that the hostilities be halted. The long marches and rain had exhausted the advancing Prussian troops and eroded discipline. The great battle on 3 July 1866 was fought at the village of Sadowa, north-west of the Bohemian town of Königgrätz (now Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic) on the upper Elbe River. It began with an attack by the Prussian Elbe and First Armies.253 The Crown Prince’s Second Army had not yet arrived to close the encirclement. At 11.30 in the morning Benedek received intelligence that along the Elbe strong Prussian forces had been spotted (the Crown Prince’s Second Army). The provisional commander of the Austrian IV Corps, Feldmarschall Lieutnant Anton Freiherr von Mollinary, demanded permission to attack to the Prussian left flank while it lay exposed. ‘There I was, standing before the extreme left wing of the Prussian army. A determined attack would have snapped off the enemy’s left wing and put us on the road to victory.’254 Zimmer believes that Benedek intended to attack but only in a conventional frontal assault. The moment passed and by the early afternoon the Crown Prince’s II Army ‘within a short time broke the Austrian flank, aided by difficult terrain and fog and by exploiting the needle gun and artillery … It all went so quickly that Benedek at first would not believe the report and replied to the officer who brought it, “Nonsense, don’t babble such stupid stuff”. It was 3 pm on the afternoon of 3 July, 1866.’255

  Later that afternoon Prince Friedrich Karl, Commander of the First Army, suddenly to his surprise met the Austrian Field Marshall Lieutenant von Gablenz, who had come to ask for terms of armistice. ‘But why are you asking for an armistice? Does your army need one?’ Gablenz: ‘My Emperor has no army left; it is as good as destroyed.’ Friedrich Karl wrote in his diary: ‘Through meeting Gablenz it was clear to me for the first time the scale of the defeat and the breadth of the victory.’256 Prince Frederick Charles, whose First Army had borne the main burden of the battle, reflected afterwards what had given Prussia the victory and concluded that it was a certain reliable ordinariness:

  It is our well-trained, well-oiled mechanism in which each knows his place, a place which even mediocrity is entirely ready to fulfil its tasks (for it is calculated on mediocrity) which has taught us how to win victories. The reorganization of the army has certainly not alone contributed to this outcome, but it was in its time a necessary perfecting of the mechanism. Geniuses in the proper sense of the word have not shown themselves.257

  In other words, on balance the Prussians had a more modern, bureaucratic attitude to war than the Austrians. The years o
f war games, theory, and repeated practice had paid off—but just. Had Benedek let Mollinary attack the Prussian left at 11.30 in the morning and thrown his ample reserves against them from the oblique position his own corps had gained, the Prussians, discipline, bureaucracy and all the rest, would have crumbled as rapidly as the Austrians did in the afternoon and the whole history of Europe would have been other than it became.

  Bismarck’s own reaction does him credit:

  He felt that he was playing a game of cards with a million-dollar stake that he did not really possess. Now that the wager had been won, he felt depressed rather than elated. And as he rode through fields with dead and wounded, he wondered what his feelings would be if his eldest son were lying there.258

  Stosch, now a general officer259 and first Quartermaster General to the Second Army, recorded the arrival of Field Marshall Lieutenant von Gablenz to ask for terms of armistice, to which Bismarck demanded the exclusion of Austria from Germany and the unification of the largely Protestant North German states as a first stage to the full unity. Except for the King of Saxony no sovereign should be deposed. Hessen and Hanover must be reduced to assure the necessary links between the eastern and western provinces of Prussia. The Crown Prince invited Bismarck to dine with the staff of the II Army and Stosch recorded his impressions:

  It was the first time I saw Bismarck personally at a social occasion and I confess gladly that the impression that I got from him nearly overwhelmed me. The clarity and grandeur of his views gave me the highest pleasure; he was secure and fresh in every direction and unfolded in each thought a whole world.260