MARSHAL VON MOLTKE'S BOOK.*
-" I DO not in the least want to know what happened in the past," says Mr. Morley, insisting on the "from which we learn what ? " manner of reading history, in a speech to which he has given the sanction of republication—" I do not in the least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through what is happening to- -day." Now, Moltke's commentaries on his Gallic wars are as -excellent literature as Cmsar or the Anabasis, but they will not much illuminate the problems of the age of the Triple Alliance and smokeless powder. From knowing what happened at Gravelotte or Sedan, the Gladstonian statesmanship of the future will not see its way more clearly for a scuttle out of Egypt or the evacuation of Quetta, than by the study of the -cavalry charge at Cynaxa, or the rout of Ariovistus.
The superior person may, therefore, fling Count Moltke's book into the fire. To those, however, for whom Clio is not a schoolmistress but a Muse, it will give much enjoyment. .Count Moltke's nephew having frequently urged him to put on paper his reminiscences—a species of composition particu- larly disliked by him, as mainly serving the ends of personal vanity, and as diffusing more darkness than light—the Field- Marshal compromised matters by devoting his mornings in the country for some months to an abridgment of the great General Staff History of the war with France, which, he re- marked, was too voluminous and specialised for popular use. Moltke was always a master of clear, terse, logical prose, in a language in which it is hard not to be obscure, long-winded, and equivocal ; and in his eighty-eighth year his style was still at its former level. Above all, he wrote in his native language pure and undefiled, not in the barbarous, fin-de-sieele conglomerate of tongues which some German literati of the age of Bismarck have substituted for the dialect of Goethe and Heine. When a single volume has to deal in detail with twenty great battles, a count- less series of minor engagements, besides twenty sieges and -operations against fortified places, the author cannot stop to dip his pen into " the hues of earthquake and eclipse." But though this work is full of the concrete in a degree which would have gladdened Carlyle's heart and driven M. Comte mad, and is therefore sometimes a little dull, its proper names and facts are set off by numerous dramatic touches, and by a rivulet of political, philosophical, and professional reflection which gives weight to the whole, while the sensa- tional gets its due in Moltke's graphic pictures of such feats of broil and battle as the great cavalry charges of Mars-la- Tour, or the sudden appearance of Prince Frederic Charles on the flank of the French army at Orleans, or Manteuffel's march across France to intercept the attempted advance of Bourbaki to the Rhine.
The material basis of the book is, as we said, the official record of the war with France, which was compiled from materials furnished by the various local military centres, whose sensibilities the Staff Corps editors had to respect. Criticism that work did not contain, and its statements were the law and the prophets from which no military man in Germany, or even a civilian who was not a professed "enemy of the Empire," liked openly to dissent. A Bavarian, a Wurtemberger, or a Saxon might mutter in confidential circles, where there was no fear of the delator—a personage as flourishing in the age of Bismarck as in that of Tiberius— that the true word had not been said about Worth, or Mars- la-Tour, or Gravelotte. Bat though the authorised version of
• Geschichle des deutsch-frassosischen Krieges eon 1870-7 1 ; neb t ern Aufsatz "Ober den angehlichen Kriegsrath in den Kriegen Konig Wilhelm. I." Von Graf Helmuth von Moltke, General-Feldmarschall. Berlin Mittler and Sohn. 191. (English translation, by Clara Bell and Henry W. Fischer, published by Messrs. Osgood, MeDvailie, and Co., London.)
those transactions remained practically unchallenged, notes of interrogation have existed in men's minds, and it was hoped, when this book was announced, that Count Moltke had dropped reserve and given his verdict on the disputed problems of the war. But the Field-Marshal's Toryism, his reverential tem- perament, his dislike of conflicts, indisposed him to throwing stones at established systems and reputations. As his nephew relates, it was " a religious and patriotic duty not to destroy certain prestiges (or legends) which connect the victories of our armies with specific personalities." However, although his posthumous History makes few positive revelations, and passes no strong censures, there is in places criticism enough, express, or between the lines. Moltke used to speak and write of the Generals in command as abstractions. In the present book, for instance, Prince Frederick Charles frequently evaporates into "Oberkommando of the 2nd Army," General von Stein- metz is " Oberkommando of the 1st Army," the Crown Prince, of the 3rd Army, and so forth. By help of these euphemisms he sometimes speaks his mind. There is a latent hint that the Crown Prince dawdled unduly on the road at the opening of the campaign, which forced the 2nd Army to undertake the risky movement of a march on the Saar with an imperfectly protected flank. In the case of General von Steinmetz, whose obstinacy led to his virtual dismissal at an early stage of the war, we read that the Commander of the 1st Army, finding his proper line of advance into France somewhat circumscribed, invaded the zone of Prince Frederick Charles, and then, being made to evacuate, struck out on a line of his own for Saarbriicken, where, on the heights of Spicheren, he fastened on General Frossard, in pursuance of his private plane. Moltke's judgment on these risky proceedings has a somewhat oracular sound :—" The remark has been made that the battle was fought in a wrong place, and that it interfered with superior plans. True, that it was not foreseen. As a rule, however, it is seldom that a tactical victory does not fit in with the strategical scheme. A success is always thankfully accepted and utilised." Whereupon he goes on to explain the advantages which accrued to the Germans from this dearly bought and obtrusive victory of Steinmetz. On that General's battle of Colombey, or Pange, east of Metz, so absurdly accepted by General Ladmirault, when be ought to have been filing off with the rest of Bazaine's army on the Verdun road, Moltke is uncomplimentary. He says that a battle had not been planned for that day (August 14th), and that the style in which the attacks on the French were delivered by the advanced guards of four separate divisions excluded all unity of command, leading, besides, to various " critical moments which might have been serious, if the enemy had attacked energetically with his collected forces." Of Mars-la-Tour, Moltke speaks as " one of the most bril- liant deeds of arms of the whole war." But to the General-in-Chief on that day (August 16th) some bad marks are given. The 2nd German Army having to intercept Bazaine's retreat on Verdun and Paris, Alvensleben's 3rd Corps headed the enemy off, and although this officer could only oppose companies to regiments, and regiments to divisions, he held his own until the 10th Corps came up, and finally maintained his ground by help of the two great cavalry charges in which both combatants proved themselves so worthy of each other's steel. Moltke's concluding remarks on this Gigantomachia are of great interest. The Prussians, he says, had wrested from the French the positions occupied by them in the morning, twilight had set in, the troops were exhausted, the horses, which had been fifteen hours under the saddle, were ready to drop. It was wrong to provoke an enemy who was still in such superior strength, and as no rein- forcements could arrive, to endanger the dearly bought success. Nevertheless, " the Oberkommando," as late as 7 at night, directed a renewed attack on the enemy all along the line. This was to order impossibilities, and the partial advance effected entailed further heavy losses on the Prussian cavalry, who were shot down in the darkness by the unseen foe.
On the battle-field of Gravelotte (August 18th) the Red Prince gave further dissatisfaction to the head of the Staff, who writes with a tinge of sarcasm :—" The Oberkommando of the 2nd Army having ordered the 12th Corps, although it stood on the right, to form the extreme left, a sensible delay occurred from the crossing of the respective lines of march." More plainly expressed is Count Moltke's disapproval of a
still greater personage,—viz., Count Moltke himself. The idea of this fine example of oblique attack was like that adopted by Epaminondas at Leuctra, by Frederick the Great at Leuthen, by Napoleon at Eylau, at Wagram. The Prussian Guard was to move up by Mars-la-Tour to Bazaine's extreme right, wherever that might turn out to be, which the 12th (Saxon) Corps were to overlap on the north, while the German right, commanded by Steinmetz, was to refrain from attack until the above-named corps had developed their battle. Steinmetz exploded prematurely, as it now seems (contrary to a current tradition) with leave, but though he stormed the fortified farm of St. Hubert, in the immediate front of Bazaine's army, was baffled in his attempts to cross the open before the adjacent positions of Moscou and Leipzig. In the afternoon, a final rush against the French left up the Mance Valley, near Gravelotte, was beaten back with heavy loss, and at 6 p.m. the battle on this aide had almost died out. To them suddenly arrived the 2nd Corps, Pomeranians, when "the King" ordered a fresh advance, for which purpose the Pomeranians were placed at the disposal of Steinmetz. The Pomeranians, who had been on their legs since 2 a.m., eagerly rushed at the enemy, but the glacis-like slope up to the Point du Jour, Moscou, and Leipzig again proved impassable, the only gain from the attack being that the German advanced front was now held by fresh troops, while the corps of Stein- metz, which were in a terribly mixed condition, had time to collect and recover. All this, adds Moltke, was wrong. " It would have been more correct if the Chief of the Staff of the Army [i.e., I], who was on the spot, had not allowed this advance at such a late hour of the evening. An entirely intact elite force might have been invaluable on the following day, but here, on this evening, was scarcely capable of achieving a decisive change in affairs." According to explana- tions given in an appendix, the King never assumed the responsibility of active interference with the Field-Marshal's plans ; so that the Royal " Up, Guards, and at 'em" was an exceptional intrusion of authority, against which Moltke after- wards felt that he had not protested with sufficient emphasis. There would have been no German victory had not the Crown Prince of Saxony (now King) got round St. Privat, where the French right was posted, and, assisted by the dilapidated Prussian Guard, completely broken up the corps of- Canrobert, which entailed the ultimate withdrawal of the French all down the line. The premature assault of St. Privat by the Prince of Wurtemberg, who flung the Guards across the plain before the arrival of the Saxons, and nearly ruined them in half-an-hour, is not criticised by Moltke. Yet the tremendous losses suffered by the corps in their fruitless attempt to approach the village under a withering fire are described in terms equivalent to disapproval. Another vexed question connected with this battle is the mistaken movement of the 9th Corps in the centre, defended by Moltke on the ground that General von Mannstein thought that he had before him the enemy's right, which he had been ordered to attack.
After Sedan, the monotony of chronic French defeat makes the interest of the story flag. The new levies of France were half-drilled or not drilled at all, and they were hopelessly sacrificed in hecatombs by presumptuous amateurs. Had the Germans been led by Wurmser or Mack, the results would have been the same, when the direction of the French armies was in the hands of a dilettante like, for instance—a civilian who shall be nameless. The profound Carnot of 1870, as Moltke relates, gave Bonrbaki, after the battle before Orleans, orders to make a movement which, said that brave General, "if I execute, not a gun nor a man of my three corps shall I ever set my eyes on again !" The field operations of the later period —e.g., those on the Loire and before Le Mans—are, for topo- graphical and other reasons, less easy to carry in the mind's eye than the earlier marches and battles of the campaign. A statue to General Faidherbe has just been unveiled, with much Ministerial eloquence, at Bapaume, near Amiens, in honour, perhaps, of the action fought there to secure the pas- sage of the Somme, and relieve the fortress of Peronne "la Pucelle." Moltke cannot make this " victory " as exciting as the matchless banqueting scene in Quentin Durward, described by Scott as taking place in Peronne; but he explains that what Faidherbe did was to hold his own with fifty-seven French battalions against seventeen German, with the result that the virgin stronghold a few days later surrendered to General von Kummer, as she did to Wellington in 1815. Bapaume,
however, deserved statuary honours more than the subsequent Battle of St. Quentin, where Faidherbe, with a superior force, was smashed to pieces by General von Goeben, losing to the Germans 12,000 prisoners, out of an effective of 40,000, and himself (more fortunate than the Constable de Montmorency on the same field in a previous cen- tury) just escaping capture. The interest revives with Bourbaki's march from the West, with the desperate pur- pose of relieving Belfort and interrupting the German communications with the Rhine. How that unfortunate General dashed himself to pieces against Werder's positions on the Lisaine, and was thereupon, in his ruined state, over- taken on the Swiss frontier by the army of Manteuffel, who. arrived, as usual with the invader, in the nick of time,—all this, and the passage of the remnants of Bourbaki's force into Swiss territory, is told by Moltke with vigour and perspicacity. Germans may rejoice that the bead of the French Army now should be the Minister whose telegraphic "conviction Bien arrkee" on professional details was a prime cause of Bourbaki's destruction, and attempted suicide.
An appendix relative to the Battle of Koniggratz, extin- guishes a legend relative to the existence of councils of war in the campaigns of 1866 and 1870. Moltke's allegation, " I can give the assurance that neither in 1866 nor in 1870-71 was any Council of War ever held," disposes of the question ; but its appearance drew forth one of the familiar Friedrichsruhe snarls. The information was given, apparently par ordre du mufti, that, on the contrary, such councils had been systematically called, and that Prince Bismarck had been one- of their most invaluable members. He it was who suggested the march into Hungary, after the battle of Koniggriitz : he it was who decided the effective bombardment of Paris. Ha a not General von Roon said, that the King had said, that the high military were jealous of the Minister's presence,. because his soldierly insight overtopped theirs ? In the same appendix, Moltke, speaking of things within his daily know- ledge at the time, remarks that the war with Austria in 1866 was not called for by the people, but was a struggle long contemplated and silently prepared, for the attainment of " an ideal good," Prussia's leadership of Germany. Reads "aggrandisement," and the truth of this is unimpeachable. Notoriously the seven weeks' war was forced upon Austria by a series of intrigues and acts of violence which excited almost universal indignation in Prussia, so as to make some observers entertain the idea that popular resistance might ensue. It has, however, been the cue of the Bismarckians to deny all this, and to vociferate against what they call a misstate- ment of the antecedents of Koniggratz. Moltke's account is minutely truthful, and it is in harmony with the view of the historian Sybel.
The Field-Marshal writes in a very sympathetic manner of the furia Francese, noting, though without comment, the jealousies and negligence of those in high command, and their entire non-observance, as Captain Fluellen would have put it, of "the disciplines of the pristine wars of the Romans." Strange to say, the political interpretation is put (somewhat con- jecturally, it is true) on Bazaine's blunders. To us it is hard to believe that devotion to Napoleon was the cause of that General's leisurely withdrawal from Metz, or of his failure to. push on his troops in the early morning of Mars-la-Tour, or of the absence of the guard, which was in reserve at Plappe- ville, at the critical moments of the Battle of Gravelotte, when the German troops were involved, though the Field-Marshal does not reveal the fact, in conditions of somewhat alarming,. though temporary, panic.
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