Page:EB1911 - Volume 18.djvu/709

 staff, which is the clearest account of the campaign and contains the best criticism upon it. In December 1862 Moltke was asked for an opinion upon the military aspect of the quarrel with Denmark then becoming acute. He thought the difficulty would be to bring the war to an end, as the Danish army would if possible retire to the islands, where, as the Danes had the command of the sea, it could not be attacked. He sketched a plan for turning the flank of the Danish army before the attack upon its position in front of Schleswig, and hoped that by this means its retreat might be intercepted. When the war began in February 1864, Moltke was not sent with the Prussian forces, but kept at Berlin. The plan was mismanaged in the execution, and the Danish army escaped to the fortresses of Düppel and Fredericia, each of which commanded a retreat across a strait on to an island. The allies were now checked; Düppel and Fredericia were besieged by them, Düppel taken by storm, and Fredericia abandoned by the Danes without assault; but the war showed no signs of ending, as the Danish army was safe in the islands of Alsen and Fünen. On the 30th of April Moltke was sent to be chief of the staff to the commander-in-chief of the allied forces, and, so soon as the armistice of May and June was over, persuaded Prince Frederick Charles to attempt to force the passage of the Sundewitt and attack the Danes in the island of Alsen. The landing was effected on the 29th of June, and the Danes then evacuated Alsen. Moltke next proposed a landing in Fünen, but it was unnecessary. The Danes no longer felt safe in their islands, and agreed to the German terms. Moltke’s appearance on the scene had quickly transformed the aspect of the war, and his influence with the king had thus acquired a firm basis. Accordingly, when in 1866 the quarrel with Austria came to a head, Moltke’s plans were adopted and he was almost invariably supported in their execution. A disciple rather of Clausewitz, whose theory of war was an effort to grasp its conditions, than of Jomini, who expounded a system of rules, Moltke regarded strategy as a practical art of adapting means to ends, and had developed the methods of Napoleon in accordance with the altered conditions. He had been the first to realize the great defensive power of modern firearms, and had inferred from it that an enveloping attack had become more formidable than the attempt to pierce an enemy’s front. He had pondered the tactics of Napoleon at Bautzen, when the emperor preferred to bring up Ney’s corps, coming from a distance, against the flank of the allies, rather than to unite it with his own force before the battle; he had also drawn a moral from the combined action of the allies at Waterloo. At the same time he had worked out the conditions of the march and supply of an army. Only one army corps could be moved along one road in the same day; to put two or three corps on the same road meant that the rear corps could not be made use of in a battle at the front. Several corps stationed close together in a small area could not be fed for more than a day or two. Accordingly he inferred that the essence of strategy lay in arrangements for the separation of the corps for marching and their concentration in time for battle. In order to make a large army manageable, it must be broken up into separate armies or groups of corps, each group under a commander authorized to regulate its movements and action subject to the instructions of the commander-in-chief as regards the direction and purpose of its operations. In the strategy of 1866 the conspicuous points are: (1) The concentration of effort. There were two groups of enemies, the Austro-Saxon armies, 270,000; and the north and south German armies, 120,000. The Prussian forces were 64,000 short of the adverse total, but Moltke determined to be superior at the decisive point against the Austro-Saxons; he therefore told off 278,000 men for that portion of the struggle, and employed only 48,000 men in Germany proper. His brilliant direction enabled the 48,000 to capture the Hanoverian army in less than a fortnight, and then to attack and drive asunder the south German forces. (2) In dealing with Austro-Saxony the difficulty was to have the Prussian army first ready—no easy matter, as the king would not mobilize until after the Austrians. Moltke’s railway knowledge helped him to save

time. Five lines of railway led from the various Prussian provinces to a series of points on the southern frontier on the curved line Zeitz-Halle-Görlitz-Schweidnitz. By employing all these railways at once, Moltke had the several army corps moved simultaneously from their peace quarters to points on this curved line. When this first move was finished the corps then marched along the curve to collect into three groups, one near Torgau (Elbe army), another at the west end of Silesia (first army, Prince Frederick Charles), the third between Landshut and Waldenburg (second army, crown prince). The first army when formed marched eastwards towards Görlitz. The small Saxon army at Dresden now had the Elbe army in its front and the first army on its right flank, and as it was outnumbered by either of them, its position was untenable, and so soon as hostilities began fell back into Bohemia, where it was joined by an Austrian corps, with which it formed an advance guard far in front of the Austrian main army concentrated near Olmütz. The Elbe army advanced to Dresden, left a garrison there, and moved to the right of Prince Frederick Charles, under whose command it now came. (3) Moltke now had two armies about 100 miles apart. The problem was how to bring them together so as to catch the Austrian army between them like the French at Waterloo between Wellington and Blücher. If, as was thought likely, the Austrians moved upon Breslau, the first and Elbe armies could continue their eastward march to. co-operate with the second. But on the 15th of June Moltke learned that on the 11th of June the Austrian army had been spread out over the country between Wildenschwerdt, Olmütz and Brünn. He inferred that it could not be concentrated at Josefstadt in less than thirteen days. Accordingly he determined to bring his own two armies together by directing each of them to advance towards Gitschin. He foresaw that the march of the crown prince would probably bring him into collision with a portion of the Austrian army; but the crown prince had 100,000 men, and it was not likely that the Austrians could have a stronger force than that within reach of him. The order to advance upon Gitschin was issued on the 22nd of June, and led to one of the greatest victories on record. The Austrians marched faster than Moltke expected, and might have opposed the crown prince with four or five corps; but Benedek’s attention was centred on Prince Frederick Charles, and he interposed against the crown prince’s advance four corps not under a common command, so that they were beaten in detail, as were also the Saxons and the Austrian corps with them, by Prince Frederick Charles. On the 1st of July Benedek collected his already shaken forces in a defensive position in front of Königgrätz. Moltke’s two armies were now within a march of one another and of the enemy. On the 3rd of July they were brought into action, the first against the Austrian front and the second against the Austrian right flank. The Austrian army was completely defeated and the campaign decided, though an advance towards Vienna was needed to bring about the peace upon Prussia’s terms. Moltke was not quite satisfied with the battle of Königgrätz. He had tried to have the Elbe army brought up to the Elbe above Königgrätz so as to prevent the Austrian retreat, but its general failed to accomplish this. He also tried to prevent the first army from pushing its attack, hoping in that way to keep the Austrians in their position until retreat should be cut off by the crown prince, but he could not restrain the impetuosity of Prince Frederick Charles and of the king. During the negotiations Bismarck, who dared not risk the active intervention of France, opposed the king’s wish to annex Saxony and perhaps other territory beyond what was actually taken. Moltke would not have hesitated; he was confident of beating both French and Austrians if the French should intervene, and he submitted to Bismarck his plans in case of need for the opening moves against both French and Austrians.

After the peace, the Prussian Diet voted Moltke the sum of £30,000, with which he bought the estate of Creisau, near Schweidnitz, in Silesia. In 1867 was published The Campaign of 1866 in Germany, a history produced under Moltke’s personal