THE BATTLE-FIELDS OF 1866.*
NONE of the specialcorrespondents employedduring this German war have made any special mark. The war was a very great one, and BOMO very good men were "out," but one unnoticed speciality in the organization of this diplomatic service of the people is that it always requires some time to develop its full power. The corre- spondents want a few preliminary days to get en rapport with officials, to find out who can tell them things, and to shake off their preconceived impressions. They have no offices to go to, no traditions to take up, no " services " to supply them by order with the information it is so difficult without aid to acquire. A man may be accredited to the best men in Berlin, in a way which implies that they will heartily assist him, and may know German thoroughly, and yet if he does not know Berlin may be for a week very much inferior to himself. The campaign of 1866, a campaign as important in its results as any of those which pre- .ceded 1815, fought itself out while correspondents were shaking themselves into their stools. Of all the acute, experienced English- men employed, only two were of much use in describing the battles fought, the rest being obliged to content themselves pretty much with describing the organization which led to the victory and defeat, and the political feeling of the populations whose for- tunes victory or defeat so grievously affected. Of these "corre- spondents of the morrow" the best, to our mind, 'is Mr. Edward Dicey. He has been in many countries, after or dur- ing many events, and though his letters are a little thinner than usual, thinner, for instance, than his letters from Italy, which have a sub-taste of sympathy with Italians, or from America, where a naturally keen intellect was excited to the utmost by a sense that he knew and his correspondents did not, he still retains his old qualities, his power of acute observation, and that passionless impartiality, an impartiality which is apathetic without being indifferent, which gives his writings their peculiar flavour. Read, for example, his account of the occupation of * The &Atli-Fields of 1866. By G. Dicey. London; Tinsley. Prague. Everything is treated without enthusiasm and without bias, nobody is blamed, everybody is excused, but still you leave that chapter with a feeling that the Prussian occupation was a very civilized form of military tyranny, that it was a frightful calamity for Prague, and that Prague, on the whole, showed leas spirit and less feeling than it ought to have shown, which is, we take it, precisely the impression Mr. E. Dicey intended to produce.
"With all the best will and the utmost grace in the world, they could not conceal the fact that they are here as conquerors. Everything, from great to small, is made subservient to their convenience ; everybody, from the greatest noble to the smallest burgher, has to give way to their pleasure. The palaces of the Wallensteins and the Clam-Gallas are turned into quarters for the officers of the Royal staff. Every house has soldiers billeted upon it ; the hotel in which I live is set down for a hundred. It is with colours flying and bands playing that the troops enter the town. Every day, too, detachments of Austrian and Saxon prisoners are marched through the streets, escorted by Prussian soldiers. The prisoners are, for the most part, men discharged from the hospitals, where they have been nursed kindly enough, and, so far as their treat- ment is concerned, they have little, I think, to complain of. But still, even to a more apathetic people than the Bohemians, the spectacle of their own troops being marched, disarmed and guarded, through the streets of their own capital, would be intolerably galling. The prisoners are followed invariably to the railway station by crowds of the towns- people, chiefly of the poorer class, and often amongst the crowd you can see women crying bitterly. Let me add that on the whole I balieve the Prussians have behaved very well in Prague, and have not given more annoyance to the inhabitants than was inseparable from their position, and a certain want of geniality that is characteristic of the nation. Bat still, oven with the best disposed troops, the citizens must often be sub- ject to insolence and outrage. Only the other night, as I was informed by a foreign eye-witness, a Prussian soldier who had got drunk drew his sword in the high street, cut an inoffensive passer-by over the head, and then planted himself in the middle of the street, threatening to cut down everybody who approached. The policemen, though they were armed, were afraid to interfere, because they had no power of touching a Prussian private. Happily, after some time, an officer rode up, and on the soldier's refusing to go home, he summoned the guard, and had the man disarmed. I am told the man will probably be shot for threatening his superior officer ; but if it had not been for the arrival of this official, the passers-by would have been at the mercy of this drunken ruffian. I cannot doubt that similar cases of a less aggravated kind occur here constantly, and that, as a rule, the citizens have to submit patiently to outrages of this sort."
Had the invaders been English or French troops, no man's life and no woman's honour would have been safe, but still minor miseries of this kind are not pleasant, and it is with a feeling of grim satis- faction one reads the remark apropos of a grand festival in Prague, which the Prussian conquest did not disturb :—" It was perhaps natural enough that the bands which belonged to the Burgher Guards should select the Diippel march, and other Prussian patriotic airs, to suit the taste of their audience. I rather doubt whether, if the English were quartered at Rouen, a French band would play 'Rule Britannia 'upon the quays out of their own free choice ; but each people has its own ways of manifesting its feelings." The whole of the letters are in the same tone. In a very quiet, easy way Mr. Dicey gives us a full account of Heligoland during its season, explains the rabbit story, which made some fuss in our newspapers a year or so ago, lets us see that the Governor, Major Manse, quiet, decent man, is a little too anxious to be a nine- teenth-century governor, and exposes a monstrous abuse,—the toleration, or rather legalization, of a "regular "silver hell" in a British possession :— " There is always a lower depth somewhere, and there may be worse conducted gaming-rooms than these English ones of ours. All I can say from my own small observation is, that they are not to be found in Germany. I quite admit that the public of the Heligoland roulette- board is decidely inferior to that of the Rhino Bads. Instead of the Russian princes, English noblemen, Wallachian boyards, And Spanish grandees, whom you may see interspersed among the mixed company of Homburg and Baden, you have here a dead level of Hamburg clerks, German officers, and Bremen brokers. They are not fine players, and they don't play high enough to invest their losses with even a spurious dignity. The vast majority of the gamblers potter about with shillings and half-crowns, exhibit an indecent exultation when they win half-a- dozen thalers, and wrangle about their losings. Still, for all that, the profits of the bank are large. Half-crowns mount up wonderfully fast when the ball goes spinning round with scarcely a minute's stoppage between the deals ; and you have only to look at the worn, eager faces of the players to see that their losses are to them, at any rate, by no means insignificant. It is this paltry, sordid play which suits best the purposes of a hell. Nobody ever broke the bank in Heligoland; nobody departs from the island carrying money away with him. Driblets by driblets, the coffers of the bank are filled ; and every year there are hundreds of visitors who lose everything they have with them before they can get away from this British gaming-room. In every German Spiel-Bad I am acquainted with, there exists a salutary provision forbid- ding the inhabitants of the town to enter the rooms ; but here, under English rule, the doors are open to everybody; and every clerk and shopboy and servant in the place is exposed to the temptation of know- ing that, if he has got a shilling in his pocket, and happens to guess the right numbers, he may win more in half-an-hour than he is likely ever to earn by a year's honest labour."
There is no principle which we are aware of which compels a civilized government to forbid either lotteries or gaming-tables.
If people are fools enough to pay away their cash for a ghost of a chance of multiplying it tenfold, they have a right to do it in one way as well as another, and we never stop their doing it on 'Change or by speculation in sugar. It is just one of those cases in which experience is the only guide, and, on the whole, experience teaches us, in the present state of the world, and amongst its half civilized populations, that it is best to suppress State lotteries and public gaming-tables. On the whole, therefore, we think any official person, say Sir F. Rogers, who read Mr. Dicey's book, would be inclined to suppress this particular pandemonium and restore Heligoland to its natural position, a quiet bathing-place for North- West Germany, so small that it is very doubtful whether the North Sea will not eat it up, so decorous that male and female residents bathe by order on different aides of the island. Mr. Dicey gives us an equally slight, but still more readable and useful, ac- count of Hanover. He thinks, like most other sensible English- men, that, on the whole, it is well for Hanover to become a pro-
vince, but he has a feeling, nevertheless, that it is partly English, -does not like to see the lion and unicorn taken down, and rather sympathizes with Hanover, which, "with much good reason, ex- tremely dislikes the idea of losing the Court."
With all his lightness of touch, Mr. Dicey has distinct views.
'They are only "views," and views, moreover, by a man accus- tomed to write leaders, but still they are the views of a singularly cool, impartial, and yet sympathetic brain. The general judg- ment which he forms upon the North German Confederation is that it is a mere preliminary to fusion, will be fused rapidly into a single kingdom, whether that be called Prussia or North Germany. He supports this view by a statement which we believe to be true, that independence under such circumstances means nothing but subjection, and by a paragraph which is valuable as a compendium of statistics : —
"Prussia will enter the North German Confederation with a population .of upwards of 23,500,000. The remaining members of the body will con- sist of Saxony, with 2,313,914 inhabitants; Mecklenburg-Schwerin, with .552,612; Saxe-Weimar, with 280,201; Saxe-Meiningen, with 178,065; Saxe-Altenburg, with 141,839; Mecklenburg - Strelitz, with 99,060; Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with 164,527; Oldenburg, with 301,812; Anhalt, with 193,046; Schwarzburg-Sondershansen, with 66,189; Schwarzburg- Rudolstadt, with 73,752; Reuss-Schleitz,, with 43,924; Reuss-Greitz, with 86,472; Schaumburg-Lippe, with 81,382; Lippe-Detmold, with 111,836; Hesse-Homburg, with 27,374. Taking the most favourable estimate, the non-Prussian States of the new Bund will not number more than 5,000,000. Their territories are detached, and stuck in different parts of Prussia, like plums in a pudding."
We hear a good deal of Saxon politics in the newspapers, and are a little apt to forget that it is not to Prussia what Wales is to Great Britain. The whole population of the new States is not to North Germany what Lancashire and Yorkshire are to the United Kingdom, and have just as little interest in combining against it.
Mr. Dicey is not enthusiastic for the Prussian Army. We suspect he does not quite like Prussians, a feeling shared by other human beings, and though he acknowledges the merit of the Prussian Army, thinking it fairly equal to the French in organiza- tion and superior in physique, he believes the summons to the Landwehr disorganized society ;
"AS to the extraordinary efficiency of the Prussian military ad- ministration, I think very little positive evidence has yet been brought forward. The troops were certainly badly clothed and shod. In a very fertile country, with railway communication open in their rear, the army was ill supplied with provisions and medi- cines. Considering the shortness of the campaign, the fact that it was conducted during the most favourable portion of the year, and the extent to which the labour of transport was lessened by the railways, the mortality in the Prussian Army was enormous—far more so, I believe, than in the Austrian; and this excessive mortality I have in- variably heard ascribed, both by native and foreign medical men, to the insufficient food with which the men were supplied, and to the unneces- sary privations to which they were exposed. I wonder whether in England we should boast of the excellence of our military administra- tion if our troops were sent into the field without tents, and had in consequence to sleep night after night without shelter of any kind. Nor is there any proof that the Prussian system is particularly favour- able to the development of military talent. General Moltke is doubt- less a strategist of a very high order ; but, with this single exception, no officer high in command has given sign of exceptional ability."
The real lesson taught by the war is, in his judgment, that, cieteris paribus, educated troops who know what they are fighting for, and care about it, will beat uneducated troops who do not know and -do not care, a truth which, with this readable book, we commend to the attention of every British voter.
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