THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Helmuth von Moltke, like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was not a Prussian by birth. His father had been an officer of the king of Denmark.* Moltke was educated as a Danish cadet, but his experiences at school had been unhappy and his relations with his father were distant, so in 1822 he applied for a commission in the Prussian army. In 1823 he passed the entrance examination to the War College, which was at that time directed by Clausewitz. In 1826 he returned to his regiment but was soon assigned to the Prussian general staff, where he remained for more than sixty years. In order to buy and maintain horses, without which he could not serve on the general staff, Moltke earned money by translating six volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Financial need had earlier compelled him to write short novels, and his letters from Turkey, where he had served as a military advisor, are still read as classics of German literature.

  With the exception of those few years in Turkey, Moltke never saw action, indeed never commanded a company or any larger unit, until, at the age of sixty-five, he took command of the Prussian armies in the war against Austria in 1866. If it was said of Bismarck that he was a “kind of Minister-President with a uniform hidden under his suit,”* the very opposite might have been said of the highly reserved and rather sensitive Moltke.

  Prussian mobilization for the Italian wars had been a fiasco. In the ensuing years until 1866, Moltke devoted himself entirely to preparations for future military operations and remained aloof from the political scene. In 1860 the Prussian king William I, and the minister of war, von Roon, had proposed a thoroughgoing reorganization of the Prussian military. This plan envisioned increasing the standing army by raising the length of military service from two years to three, while converting the militia to a reserve force, which in turn meant the abolition of those militia-like sections of the armed forces, the territorial army, in which liberal politics had generally prevailed. In May the Prussian parliament agreed to vote additional military credits on the understanding that the government was withdrawing the reorganization plan and would use the money only to strengthen existing units. New units had already been formed, however. Further military credits were then denied; a parliamentary dissolution followed and a new election was held in December 1861. This and another election in May 1862 only reinforced the parliamentary opposition to military reform. In September 1862 Otto von Bismarck was called in by the crown to break the deadlock, a “konfliktminister” who, it was assumed, was willing to violate constitutional rules in order to quell the opposition. It was at this time that he made his famous statement directly attacking the prevailing constitutional order in Europe:

  Prussia's frontiers as laid down by the Vienna treaties are not conducive to a healthy national life; it is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.†

  He followed this in January by saying menacingly that if the Parliament refused to agree, conflict would follow, and “conflicts become questions of power. He who has the power in his hands goes forward, because the life of the State cannot stand still even for one moment.”74

  When new elections in October 1863 strengthened the Opposition in Parliament, Bismarck simply ruled without an approved budget. This period of nonparliamentary rule allowed the army to institute its reforms and, ultimately, to implement its innovative strategy. Holborn concludes:

  The constitutional conflict was still raging when the battle of Koniggratz was fought. The parliamentary opposition, however, broke down when the Bismarckian policy and Moltke's victories fulfilled the longing for German national unity. Moltke's successful strategy, therefore, decided two issues: first, the rise of a unified Germany among the nations of Europe; second, the victory of the Prussian crown over the liberal and democratic opposition in Germany through the maintenance of the authoritarian structure of the Prussian army.75

  Prussian innovations in strategy were well designed to serve both these purposes, and indeed could not have succeeded without the new constitutional structure because they depended upon a highly motivated, highly disciplined force of immense size under a central command with spaciously delegated constitutional authority.

  The Napoleonic strategic revolution had been carefully studied by all the armies of Europe. As early as 1815 it had become the new dogma, and its imperatives were in part responsible for the development of the state-nation that it called into being. Napoleon Bonaparte had stood the strategic ideas of the eighteenth century on their head. These ideas held that, as territorial gain was the object of warfare and war was prosecuted by expensive, professional armies, battles were to be avoided. Wars became intricate ballets of position, each army maneuvering to force the other from one less favorable territorial position to another, occupying the ceded ground. This was the strategic paradigm of the territorial state. The Napoleonic campaign denied all these principles. Instead of avoiding actual clashes, such campaigns sought battle, and the larger and more destructive the better, because it was by battle that the forces of the enemy could be destroyed. Only this would cause the collapse of morale that would force the enemy government to sue for peace and put that government at the mercy of French terms. It was not territory that Napoleon I sought, but the political and economic resources of the conquered nation, so these could be exploited by the French state. This was the strategic paradigm of the state-nation.

  A liturgy of Napoleonic principles soon replaced the study of the campaigns of Frederick the Great. In the widely read writings of the Swiss theoretician Jomini, Napoleon's ideas were reduced to a set of rational rules and geometric axioms. The Prussian school of strategy, however, drew a different conclusion from Napoleon's campaigns. The most important lesson for the Prussians was the link drawn between the political objectives of war and its strategic prosecution, a connection summed up in the concept of the “moral” element in warfare. Napoleon's Prussian students stressed the role of spontaneity in his decisions and the ineluctable nature of the unpredictable. To these theoretical insights, they added the tactical possibilities opened up by the technology of the Industrial Revolution. This technology included techniques for manufacturing armaments that greatly increased the lethality of fire; the telegraph, which expanded the immediacy and range of communications; and, perhaps most significantly, the railroad, which promised to transform logistics.

  In the Italian wars of 1859, a French force of 120,000 reached the theater of operations in eleven days by rail; had they marched, it would have taken two months. Generally it was calculated that troops could be transported by railway six times as fast as the armies of Napoleon I had marched. In addition to the railroad, there was now in place a dense road system that had come into being in the course of the explosive development of European industrial trade. Not only the movement of men, but also their resupply with matériel was affected by the railroad and road network. Forces arrived in good shape; they could be maintained for months on end by their home economies; the injured could be evacuated; home leaves and furloughs became possible, with all the consequences for morale in the field and politics in civil society.*

  The limits to the size of armies that Napoleon I had shattered had reim-posed themselves in his Russian campaign. There was a limit to what foraging and pillage could accomplish to effectuate resupply. But with provisioning by rail there was in principle no limit imposed by logistics on the size of armies that could be fielded. Only the national economy and the demography of the society remained constraints. In 1870 the North German Federation deployed against France exactly twice the number of men Napoleon had led into Russia: 1,200,000. By the time Germany fielded an army in the next war, that number would double again.

  Technological developments either enhanced the importance of sheer numbers—like new technologies of lethal firepower—or made those numbers more effective, like the development of the telegraph that gave commanders greater control of their forces. By the 1860s firearms had undergone c
onsiderable improvement since their introduction as slow-firing muskets. The smooth-bore, muzzle-loading musket, whose awkwardness had inspired the elaborate quadrilles of Maurice of Nassau, was replaced by the breech-loading, rapid-firing, rifled firearm. Rifling, the grooving inside barrels that increased the range and accuracy of a weapon fivefold, was in use by the 1840s, by which time the percussion cap had replaced the flintlock. In 1866 the Prussians fought with the Dreyse “needle gun,” the first rifled breechloader. This fired three shots to a muzzle-loaded rifle's one, and could be fired lying down. “For the first time in the history of war the infantryman could kill his adversary at a range of several hundred yards without presenting a target himself.”76 According to Strachan, between 1840 and 1900 the range and rate of small-arms fire had increased tenfold.77 In artillery, analogous developments took place. By 1870 Krupp was producing new steel breech-loading rifled cannon with ranges in excess of three thousand yards.

  These technological developments challenged the prudence of the Napoleonic confrontation. How could an attacking force close with the enemy if they were battered to pieces miles before even sighting them? Just as importantly, how could the commander deploy forces in these huge numbers as anything more than a giant, confused mass? In 1865 Moltke wrote:

  The difficulties in mobility grow with the size of military units; one cannot transport more than one army corps on one road on the same day. They also grow, however, the closer one gets to the goal since this limits the number of available roads. It follows that the normal state of any army is its separation into corps and that the massing together of these corps without a very definite aim is a mistake…. A massed army can no longer march, it can only be moved over the fields. In order to march, the army has first to be broken up, which is dangerous in the face of the enemy. Since, however, the concentration of all troops is absolutely necessary for battle, the essence of strategy consists in the organization of separate marches, but so as to provide for concentration at the right moment.78

  Napoleon I had demonstrated at Ulm the power of dividing the army into columns that advanced to a critical point for juncture. Napoleon, however, had held that an army must be massed days before battle. Partly this was dictated by the time it took for columns to re-form in battle formation. But partly also it was the result of Napoleon's preference for interior lines, an undivided force, frontal assault at the crucial moment, and central tactical command. Such tactics seemed suicidal now in the face of the advances in firepower that a defensive position could deploy with such lethal effectiveness. Scharnhorst was among the first to adapt the Napoleonic principle of concentrated forces to new conditions through the use of concentric movements. In Moltke, strategy found a commander who would use concentric operations and detached corps on a scale undreamt of before. As Rothenberg has observed:

  Confronted with the deadlock imposed by new weapons and extended frontages, Moltke… developed the concept of outflanking the enemy in one continuous strategic-operational sequence… By seizing the initiative from the outset, he intended to drive his opponent into a partial or complete envelopment, destroying his army in a great and decisive battle of annihilation or encirclement.79

  Outflanking maneuvers of this kind—because they had to encompass the enormous lines made possible by armies in unprecedented numbers— would call for enormous numbers as well. The army with the greatest resources in manpower and supply would enjoy a decisive advantage. This required not only a sense of national purpose (which the state-nation was well-suited to provide) but also a sense of participation in the politics that led to war (which only the nation-state could fulfill). “[T]he greater the sense of participation in the affairs of the State, the more was the State seen as the embodiment of these unique and higher value systems which called it into being, and the greater became the commitment to protect and serve it.”80

  Thus popular participation became the instrument that both created the nation-state and was itself reinforced by the institutions of the State it created. This phenomenon is evident in the history of the creation of the nation-state Germany by the Prussian state-nation.

  Bismarck had begun by identifying Prussia as the apotheosis of the German; accordingly there was nothing “more German than the development of Prussia's particular interests.”81 But this was by no means clear to the other members of the German federal diet, including especially the Austrians. It was Bismarck's task to somehow separate the Austrians from the mission of unification and then carry out that mission so successfully as to silence opposition to Prussian leadership among the other apprehensive German states.

  Bismarck became minister-president in 1862. The following November, King Frederick VII of Denmark died, and the main line of the Danish royal house became extinct. The provinces of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg had been attached to the Danish kingdom in much the same way that Hanover had been attached, for dynastic reasons, to the British kingdom: Frederick had been duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and as duke of Holstein and Lauenburg as well had been represented in the German Confederation. As with Hanover, Holstein and Lauenburg were by language and geography German. Two national movements, the German and the Danish, competed for support in the duchies, whose independence had been guaranteed by the 1852 Treaty of London, to which the great powers were signatories.

  In March 1863, the Danish parliament rashly incorporated Schleswig* on the nationalistic grounds that most of the population of Schleswig was Danish, conceding that Holstein and Lauenburg held special rights. In reply, acting in the name of the Confederation on behalf of the German minority in the duchy, Prussian and Austrian forces invaded Schleswig in January and Jutland in March. Anglo-French opposition to the invasion was frustrated by English fears of encouraging a French move against the Rhine. In August the new king of Denmark, whose forces had been overwhelmed despite some initial misfires by the Prussian general, surrendered his rights in Schleswig.

  Having contrived a successful military alliance with Austria over Schleswig, Bismarck proceeded to use this success as a hammer to break first the Confederation and then Austria herself. The apparent Austrian-Prussian rapprochement put Prussia in a good position to renew the Franco-Prussian free-trade treaty that Prussia had negotiated in 1862, playing on French fears of a Habsburg/Confederation-wide competing market. Bismarck now proposed expanding this treaty to include the entire Confederation, excluding Austria. Eventually even the southern, pro-Austrian states came along because they were unable to survive without the markets and outlets controlled by North Germany.

  Bismarck then used the Austro-Prussian military success to drive a wedge between Austria and the rest of the German states. Austria and most of the southern German states in the Confederation had expected to bring Schleswig into the Confederation along with Holstein. Bismarck rejected this and instead negotiated an agreement with Austria partitioning the duchies, Austria to administer Holstein and Prussia, Schleswig, on an ad interim basis. In so doing, he was playing on the unreformed constitutional structure of the multinational Habsburg state that was perforce insensitive to the contradiction of accumulating isolated, ethnically distinct provinces.

  This agreement, the Treaty of Bad Gastein, discredited Austria within the Confederation, as well as put her in the impossible position of attempting to administer a remote and recalcitrant state that lay between Prussia and Denmark. Bismarck took covert steps to exacerbate this difficulty, as well as stimulating Prussian public opinion to call for the annexation of both duchies into Prussia. Attempting a retreat from its position, Austria then reasserted its support for an independent duke and proposed that the decision be left to the Confederation. This Bismarck knew would result in a rejection of Prussian claims to the duchies, because the Confederation would vote for a separate state constructed from a union between the duchies. Prussia therefore denounced this move as a breach of the treaty and a cause for war. Bismarck promptly concluded a treaty with Italy to attack Austria and add Venetia to the Italian national state; h
e also began talks with Hungarian nationalists. Next he attempted to isolate Austria within the Confederation by bidding for the support of the German liberals, to whom he proposed a national parliament elected by universal suffrage. When Austria asked the Confederation to reject Prussia's proposals, Prussia responded by announcing that the German Confederation had ceased to exist, and called upon the German states to join a new Confederation, the North German Confederation, that excluded Austria.

  The Prussian king, William I, had wished to avoid war with the Austrians and as a consequence the Prussians began their mobilization late, such that there was doubt whether an effective offensive could be mounted. But whereas the Austrians could employ only one railroad line for their mobi-lilization in Moravia, Moltke used five to transport Prussian troops from all over Prussia to the battlefront. Thus on June 5, 1866, the Prussian armies spread over a half circle of 275 miles. Moltke began at once to draw them closer toward the center, but steadfastly refused to order a full concentration in a small area. It was not until June 22 that officers of the Prussian vanguard handed their Austrian counterparts notice of the Prussian declaration of war.

  The Austrian army moved from Moravia in three parallel columns, reaching their destination on June 26. Their commander, Benedek, was a product of the old school: fearless, stolid, he relied on formation in depth and the advantage of an interior line of operations. He failed, however, to derive the chief advantage of such a concentration when he delayed attacking either of the two equally strong Prussian armies facing him. Moreover, Benedek's early concentration inhibited his mobility. Once the opportunity had passed it was too late for the Austrians even to retreat behind the Elbe at Koniggratz and Benedek was forced to accept battle with the river at his rear. Like a Wagnerian overture, Moltke continued to hold off the final climax, keeping his armies one day's distance from each other until the night of July 2. At that time, he ordered the two Prussian armies to operate not merely against the flanks, but against the rear of the enemy: a strategy of encirclement. This did not completely come off, but at Koniggratz the Austrian army did lose the war as well as a fourth of its strength. Because Benedek did not retain enough space to advance against one portion of the Prussian army and then turn against the other, but instead was so hemmed in that he could not attack one force without being immediately attacked in his rear, the advantage of the interior line was forfeited. Had the local commanders actually carried out Moltke's orders for encirclement, it is possible the Austrian army would have been entirely destroyed, as occurred when Moltke's battle plan was executed against the French at Sedan.