Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  The spirit that led to bold and dashing acts of heroism had not—to Moltke’s intense annoyance—died out. Such bravado led to serious breaches of his careful plans. None was more guilty of disobedience than General von Steinmetz, Commander-in-Chief of the First Army. Karl Friedrich von Steinmetz posed two problems for his fellow commanders and for Moltke. He was 73 when the war broke out and many thought him too old. His biographer writes of him that ‘he had few friends in the army during his lifetime. That arose from his gruff nature and the high standards he set in the service. A serious, closed character, he was mostly misunderstood by his contemporaries.’113 Lieutenant Colonel Waldersee put it more strongly on 25 July:

  That they have given old Steinmetz the I. Army I cannot understand. He was already three-quarters mad in 1866 and is now four years older. He will not lack energy in his moves but that is not enough.114

  Steinmetz was blamed for attacking at Spichern when Moltke wanted him to wait and in September he was relieved of his command, promoted, and sent off to Posen. Other than that the command structure worked smoothly, and Moltke’s reliance on his commanders proved successful. What never worked was the relationship between Bismarck and Moltke. Bismarck showed up on 31 July in the Headquarters of the King at Mainz kitted out in the uniform of a Major General of the reserve, a spiked helmet of the heavy cavalry, and huge leather hip boots, a ridiculous and unmilitary figure.115 The soldiers may have laughed but the German public began to worship at the altar of the ‘German giant’ and, as Johnannes Willms shrewdly observes, his distinctive features, instantly recognizable and ideal for pictures, ornamental mugs, and busts looked particularly good in the Pickelhaube.116 The waspish Waldersee kept a sharp eye on Bismarck and recorded in his diary the details. On 2 August he wrote on the quarters taken up in Mainz:

  The King and his entourage have been housed in the grand-ducal palace. Otherwise the rest of the headquarters is scattered across Mainz, about which many are annoyed, in particular, Bismarck, who lives very prettily with a patriotic wine merchant but pretty far out. He complains all the time.117

  The war began badly for the French. On 4 August there was a fierce skirmish at Wissembourg; on 5 August the battle of Spichern; and on 6 August, the full-scale battle of Wörth, where for the first time 100,000 men on both sides clashed. Here it became clear that the German needle-gun could not compete with the French chassepôt and Moltke soberly records that at Wörth alone the Prussians lost 10,000 men.118 The victor at Wörth, the Crown Prince Frederick, recorded the event in his war diary:

  I have today completely defeated Marshall MacMahon, putting his troops to utter and disorderly rout. So far as it has been possible to ascertain, his whole corps was engaged, reinforced by Failly and Canrobet as well as by troops brought from Grenoble, approximately a force of 80,000 men against me, who brought 100,000 men into the fighting line. The engagement, which, again!, cost us a very great number of officers and men deserves the title of a veritable battle, in which the greater part of my army fought. … The losses of the French must be extraordinarily heavy; the dead lay in heaps and the red cloth of their uniforms showed up wherever the eye fell. Six thousand unwounded prisoners have been reported to me, including regimental and battalion commanders and 100 other officers. Among them I came upon a Colonel in the Cuirasseurs, who must have recognized me by my star, for he instantly gave me my proper title: ‘Ah, monseigneur. Quelle défaite, quel malheur; j’ai la honte d’être prisonnier, nous avons tout perdu! I tried to comfort him by saying: ‘Vous avez tort de dire d’avoir perdu tout, car après tout vous avez battu comme des braves soldats, vous n’avez pas perdu l’honneur.’ To this he replied ‘Ah, merci vous me faites bien en me traitant de la sorte.’ I had him give me the address of those belonging to him so as to send news to the family. Later I came on a great number of other officers in like plight to whom I spoke to the same effect.119

  There followed several other bloody confrontations and part of the defeated French army regrouped at Metz. When they tried to break out, the greatest battle of the entire war followed, the Battle of Gravelotte-St-Privat, in which the Prussians this time under the direct command of Moltke with two whole armies and over 180,000 men attacked about 112,000 French troops under Marshal François-Achille Bazaine. The attacking forces as in the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War faced withering French fire and the Prussians and southern German allies lost over 20,000, in part, as Moltke admitted through a miscalculation of his. The first fourteen days and six battles had cost the Prussians over 50,000 dead.120 Bazaine’s troops took refuge in Metz and, though, as Moltke wrote, ‘the siege of Metz had formed no part of the original plan of campaign’, he had no choice but to invest the city.

  Meanwhile Marshal McMahon in command of the other French Army very prudently planned to withdraw to Paris to confront the invaders with a strongly fortified city. Napoleon III ordered him to relieve Bazaine in Metz and the newly formed Army of Châlons with Napoleon in command set off northwards along the Belgian frontier to try to go round the Prussians. On 2 September 1870 at Sedan, Moltke caught them in one of his pincer movements and defeated McMahon’s army and took Napoleon III prisoner. Within hours of the news reaching Paris, crowds of furious citizens took to the streets and declared the revival of the Republic on 4 September 1870.

  Though the war had been much more devastating than Moltke had expected, he had won it by his immaculate planning and the generally orderly operations of the three armies under his command. What happened next had not been imagined. Leon Gambetta, Jules Favre, and General Trochi formed a government of National Defence and rejected Bismarck’s relatively moderate demands for an armistice. Jules Favre on behalf of the Government of National Defence declared on 6 September that France would not yield an inch of its territory nor a stone of its fortresses.121 Gambetta became Minister of War and, as Moltke drily writes, ‘Gambetta’s rare energy and unrelenting determination availed, indeed, to induce the entire population to take up arms, but not to direct these hasty levies with unity of purpose.’122 In other words, the Prussian commanders faced a long, wearing and unpopular guerrilla campaign, a ‘people’s war’ which regained much of the popular support that that government of France had lost.

  The next few months strained the nerves of all those involved and relations between Bismarck and the General Staff deteriorated. Lieutenant Colonel Waldersee had a choice seat on the edge of the battle for control between Bismarck and the soldiers. As a nosey gossip and intriguer, he had already decided, as his diary entry for 3 August put it, to ‘try to maintain my contacts in the General Staff and as a man with the right background I have a basis. Besides, Bronsart, Verdy and Brandenstein are my old friends and acquaintances.’123 He was the same age and rank as the three lieutenant colonels who ran the three operating divisions under Moltke—Paul Bronsart von Schellendorf, Julius Verdy du Vernois, and Karl von Brandenstein, whom Bismarck bitterly called the ‘demi-gods’, the agents of God himself, General von Moltke. The three, especially Bronsart, came to hate Bismarck and did everything to prevent him from getting his way. Waldersee recorded that Bismarck also had his ‘demi-gods’:

  Bismarck, who leads his own team, Abecken, Keudell, Hatzfeld, Karl Bismarck-Bohlen together with several code clerks and councillors, operates with three or four horse-drawn carriages. He himself travels in a very heavy travel carriage with four horses, which cannot keep up with the stallions of the King. For this reason they begin to intrigue against the long marches.124

  After the declaration of total war by the French Government of National Defence, military and diplomatic considerations became hopelessly entangled. Bismarck needed to get an armistice to keep the Russians, Austrians, and English out of the struggle. Now that Count Beust, the former Saxon Prime Minister, had become the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, there was a real danger that the Habsburgs might fall on the Prussians from the rear to undo the humiliations of 1866. Bismarck needed to get the war over quickly. These anxieties min
gled with the wild and uncontrollable rage that seized Bismarck when anyone opposed him, and now Moltke and his ‘demigods’ did so daily.

  On 9 September Waldersee recorded the first crisis between the General Staff and Bismarck. The issue was whether a particular police office was to be under Bismarck or the General Staff and Bismarck reacted as he had with the Prussian State Ministry over the Hanoverian nominated to be postal director.

  Between Bismarck and the General Staff open war has broken out … One got out the file and showed the Minister President his signature. He said, not stupid, ‘I sign so many documents about which I have no idea, that this signature does matter at all. I have no knowledge of any such agreement and consider it to be false.’ Negotiations became very lively. Because he had been caught out and proven to be in the wrong, Bismarck took it very badly and this trivial issue led to a quarrel. Moltke stayed out of the business but Podbielski and the department chiefs have ruined their relationship to Bismarck.125

  On 20 September 1870 the Royal Headquarters moved to the famous villa of Baron James de Rothschild at Ferrières. Before dinner the King walked through the ground floor rooms of the château. In the hall of mirrors, he looked at the many reliefs on the walls and said: ‘I am too poor to buy myself such a thing.’126 Paul Bronsart von Schellendorf also recorded his impressions of Ferrières: ‘The ancestors of Baron Rothschild (coats of arms, lions and eagles) are very numerous and often set in marble, bronze, oil and pastel. There wherever possible, the coat of arms has been placed. General Stuckow declared that whole interior decoration was shameless.’127 The various staff officers joked about coats of arms with JR (James de Rothschild) in them and played with phrases like ‘Judaeorum Rex’ and ‘der Judenkönig’. When Bismarck engaged his private banker Gerson Bleichröder to negotiate off the record about French reparations, Moltke’s staff called Bleichröder ‘des Kanzlers Privatjude’ (the Chancellor’s private Jew).128 During the siege of Paris in January 1871, Bismarck said to his staff:

  Bleichröder will come running and prostrate himself on behalf of the whole Rothschild family. Then we will send both to Paris and they can join the dog hunt. … Well in the first place Bleichröder should go into battle. He must get into Paris right away so that he and his co-religionists can smell each other and talk with bankers.129

  Waldersee described the accommodation in Ferrières:

  Here in the château, besides the King who has been housed on the ground floor left, there are Bismarck, Moltke, Roon, and the entire entourages of the King and Bismarck. In the beautiful stable buildings, some of which have been converted to guest rooms, the General Staff and Ministry of War have been housed. Everybody else is in the village. In Lagny, Prince Karl, the Grand Duke of Weimar, Prince Luitpold [of Bavaria], the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the General Inspector of Artillery and of Engineers. Naturally great dissatisfaction all round. The second staff want to be in Ferrières and in Ferrières everybody wants to be in the château.130

  By 19 September, as Moltke writes, the VIth Corps of the III Army had marched on Versailles in two columns and the Bavarian Corps had fought its way to the Paris suburbs. By the evening, he writes, ‘the investment of Paris was complete on all sides. Six Army Corps stood in a deployment some fifty miles in circumference immediately in front of the enemy’s capital.’131 What to do next raised a problem. Moltke denied the argument of those who claimed later ‘that it would have been possible to capture one of the forts on this day by forcing an entrance with the fugitive enemy.’ The forts were formidable and could have been defended even if French troops in retreat were still entering. Moltke believed that ‘the escalade of masonry escarpments eighteen feet high can never be successful without much preparation … probable failure would have endangered the important success of the day.’132 The result was a stalemate which lasted for months during which Paris carried out its own revolution of 1789 against the provinces, known to history as the Commune.

  On 24 September Waldersee dined with Bismarck. The Princess Karl had written to let him know that the ‘Queen had been vigorously agitating that we should take no land from the dear French. Together with her Princess Radziwill, etc. I should tell Prince Bismarck. As I did so, he said, “I know the clique and their shameful intrigues very well. The King is worked on in every letter from the Queen. I think for a while a bolt has been shoved across it. At my request the King wrote such a rude letter that she will not dare try anything for a while”.’133

  On 1 October 1870 the General Staff entertained Count Bismarck at their table. Lieutenant Colonel Bronsart von Schellendorf recorded a conversation in his diary:

  He had, as it happens, expected that immediately after the arrival of the King Baron von Rothschild would have enquired about the King’s orders and arranged for a decent reception of the entourage. That did not happen. Bismarck thereafter decided to treat him as a Jewish merchant. He wished to buy wine from the cellar. The administrator replied that in this house ‘où l’argent n’est rien’ nothing was ever sold. Bismarck insisted, ordered wine and a bill on which the price of every bottle plus 50 centimes for corkage was added.134

  What to do with the French popular rising continued to trouble the General Staff and Bismarck. On 4 October Waldersee recorded a conversation Bismarck had with the American General Philip Sheridan, who had been assigned to the Prussian Army as a military observer. Sheridan (1831–88) had become famous or infamous for his campaign in 1864 in the Shenendoah Valley during the American Civil War, when he ordered his Union troops to set fire to civilian houses and barns in the so-called ‘burning’, an example of the technique known later as ‘scorched earth’. Sheridan said to Bismarck:

  ‘You know how to defeat an enemy better than any army in the world, but to destroy him, you have not learned. One must see smoke from burning villages; otherwise you will never finish the French.’ And I am convinced that the man is right. Destroy great strips of territory à la Sheridan across the country, that will take the wind out of French sails and put an end to snipers.135

  Moltke refused to take the guerrilla war seriously. On 7 October he announced with his usual, calm certainty, ‘the war is over; there are just twitchings left. There can be no question of more large operations.’136 But it was not over and went on for months.

  On 5 October the entire German headquarters moved to Versailles. Holstein described the conditions in his Memoirs:

  Our stay in Versailles was particularly trying to our nerves because of the high room temperature the Chancellor insisted on. One day he complained bitterly of the cold. ‘The office staff apparently does not wish me to come downstairs.’ We looked at the thermometer; it was between 16 and 17 degrees. When the Chancellor unbuttoned his military greatcoat you could see it was lined with doeskin, but he only undid it when the temperature was 18 degrees Réaumur with a huge fire burning in the grate. [18 Réaumur = 72.5 Fahrenheit or 22 Celsius]

  Bismarck’s temper worsened as the General Staff debated what to do about the siege of Paris during October and November. They considered uncertainly whether to bombard the city with their powerful siege guns or to try to starve it into submission. Keudell described a characteristic clash between Bismarck and Moltke:

  On 18 October Roon and Moltke went to the Chancellor. Shortly after the conference a pain in his foot began which lasted for several days. I concluded from that, Moltke’s refusal to shell Paris could not be overcome, although it was well known that Roon favoured it.137