The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (38 page)

The Prussian “military revolution” of the 1860s, soon to produce what Disraeli would grandly term the “German revolution” in European affairs, was based upon a number of interrelated elements. The first of these was a unique short-service system, pushed through by the new King Wilhelm I and his war minister against their Liberal opponents, which involved three years’ obligatory service in the regular army and then another four in the reserve before each man passed into the Landwehr—which meant that the fully mobilized Prussian army had seven annual intakes.
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Since no substitutes were permitted, and the Landwehr could take over most garrison and “rear area” duties, such a system gave Prussia a far larger front-line army relative to its population than any other Great Power had. This depended, in turn, upon a relatively high level of at least primary education among the people—a rapidly expandable, short-service system, in the opinion of most experts, would be difficult to work in a nation of uneducated peasants—and it depended also upon a superb organization simply to handle such great numbers. There was, after all, little use in raising a force of half a million or a million men if they could not be adequately trained, clothed, armed, and fed, and transported to the decisive battle zone; and it would be even more of a waste of manpower and resources if the army commander could not communicate with and control the sheer masses involved.

The body imparting control to this force was the Prussian General Staff, which rose from obscurity in the early 1860s to be “the brains of the army” under the elder Moltke’s genius. Hitherto, most armies in peacetime had consisted of combat units, supported by quartermaster, personnel, engineering, and other branches; actual military staffs were scrambled together only when campaigning began and a command was established. In the Prussian case, however, Moltke had recruited the brightest products of the War Academy and taught them to plan and prepare for possible future conflicts. Operations plans had to be made, and frequently revised, well before the outbreak of hostilities; war games and maneuvers bore careful study, as did historical campaigns and operations carried out by other powers. A special department was created to supervise the Prussian railway system and make sure that troops and supplies could be speeded to their destinations. Above all, Moltke’s staff system attempted to inculcate in the officer corps the operational practice of dealing with large bodies of men
(army corps or full armies) which would move and fight independently but always be ready to converge upon the scene of the decisive battle. If communication could not be maintained with Moltke’s headquarters in the rear, generals at the front were permitted to use their initiative and to act according to a few basic ground rules.

The above is, of course, an idealized model. The Prussian army was not perfect and was to suffer from many teething troubles in actual battle even after the reforms of the early to middle 1860s. Many of the field commanders ignored Moltke’s advice and crashed blindly ahead in premature attacks or in the wrong direction—the Austrian campaign of 1866 was full of such blunders.
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At the tactical level, too, the frontal assault (and heavy loses) of the Prussian Guards at Gravelotte St. Privat in 1870 demonstrated a crass stupidity. The railway supply system by itself did not guarantee success; often it merely built up a vast stockpile of stores at the frontier, while the armies which needed those stocks had moved away from any nearby lines. Nor could it be said that Prussian scientific planning had ensured that their forces always possessed the best weapons: Austrian artillery was clearly superior in 1866, and the French Chassepot bolt-action rifle was stupendously better in 1870.

The real point about the Prussian system was not that it was free of errors, but that the general staff carefully studied its past mistakes and readjusted training, organization, and weapons accordingly. When the weakness of its artillery was demonstrated in 1866, the Prussian army swiftly turned to the new Krupp breechloader which was going to be so impressive in 1870. When delays occurred in the railway supply arrangements, a new organization was established to improve matters. Finally, Moltke’s emphasis upon the deployment of several full armies which could operate independently yet also come to one another’s aid meant that even if one such force was badly mauled in detail—as actually occurred in both the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars—the overall campaign was not ruined.
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It was therefore a combination of factors which gave the Prussians the swift victory over the Austrians in the summer of 1866 that few observers had anticipated. Although Hanover, Saxony, and other northern German states joined the Habsburg side, Bismarck’s diplomacy had ensured that none of the Great Powers would intervene in the initial stages of the struggle; and this in turn gave Moltke the opportunity to dispatch three armies through separate mountain routes to converge on the Bohemian plain and assault the Austrians at Sadowa (Koeniggratz). In retrospect, the outcome seems all too predictable. Over one-quarter of the Habsburg forces were needed in Italy (where they were victorious); and the Prussian recruitment system meant that despite Prussia’s population being less than half that of its various foes, Moltke could deploy almost as many front-line troops.
The Habsburg army had been underfinanced, had no real staff system, and was ineptly led by Benedek; and however bravely individual units fought, they were slaughtered in open clashes by the far superior Prussian rifles. By October 1866, the Habsburgs had been forced to cede Venetia and to withdraw from any interest in Germany—which was by then well on its way to being reorganized under Bismarck’s North German Federation.
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The “struggle for mastery in Germany” was almost complete; but the clash over who was supreme in western Europe, Prussia or an increasingly nervous and suspicious France, had been brought much closer, and by the late 1860s each side was calculating its chances. Ostensibly, France still appeared the stronger. Its population was much larger than Prussia’s (although the total number of
German-speakers
in Europe was greater). The French army had gained experience in the Crimea, Italy, and overseas. It possessed the best rifle in the world, the Chassepot, which far outranged the Prussian needlegun; and it had a new secret weapon, the
mitrailleuse
, a machine gun which could fire 150 rounds a minute. Its navy was far superior; and help was expected from Austria-Hungary and Italy. When the time came in July 1870 to chastise the Prussians for their effrontery (i.e., Bismarck’s devious diplomacy over the future of Luxembourg, and over a possible Hohenzollern candidate to the Spanish throne), few Frenchmen had doubts about the outcome.

The magnitude and swiftness of the French collapse—by September 4 its battered army had surrendered at Sedan, Napoleon III was a prisoner, and the imperial regime had been overthrown in Paris—was a devastating blow to such rosy assumptions. As it turned out, neither Austria-Hungary nor Italy came to France’s aid, and French sea power proved totally ineffective. All therefore had depended upon the rival armies, and here the Prussians proved indisputably superior. Although both sides used their railway networks to dispatch large forces to the frontier, the French mobilization was much less efficient. Called-up reservists had to catch up with their regiments, which had already gone to the front. Artillery batteries were scattered all over France, and could not be easily concentrated. By contrast, within fifteen days of the declaration of war, three German armies (of well over 300,000 men) were advancing into the Saarland and Alsace. The Chassepot rifle’s advantage was all too frequently neutralized by the Prussian tactic of pushing forward their mobile, quick-firing artillery. The
mitrailleuse
was kept in the rear, and never employed effectively. Marshal Bazaine’s lethargy and ineptness were indescribable, and Napoleon himself was little better. By contrast, while individual Prussian units blundered and suffered heavy losses in “the fog of war,” Moltke’s distant supervision of the various armies and his willingness to rearrange his plans to exploit unexpected circumstances kept up the momentum
of the invasion until the French cracked. Although republican forces were to maintain a resistance for another few months, the German grip around Paris and upon northeastern France inexorably tightened; the fruitless counterattacks of the Army of the Loire and the irritations offered by
francs-tireurs
could not conceal the fact that France had been smashed as an independent Great Power.
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The triumph of Prussia-Germany was, quite clearly, a triumph of its military system; but, as Michael Howard acutely notes, “the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its entirety.”
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Behind the sweeping advances of the German columns and the controlled orchestration of the general staff there lay a nation much better equipped and prepared for the conditions of modern warfare than any other in Europe. In 1870, the German states combined already possessed a larger population than France, and only disunity had disguised that fact. Germany had more miles of railway lines, better arranged for military purposes. Its gross national product and its iron and steel production were just then overtaking the French totals. Its coal production was two and a half times as great, and its consumption from modern energy sources was 50 percent larger. The Industrial Revolution in Germany was creating many more large-scale firms, such as the Krupp steel and armaments combine, which gave the Prusso-German state both military and industrial muscle. The army’s short-service system was offensive to liberals inside and outside the country—and criticism of “Prussian militarism” was widespread in these years—but it mobilized the manpower of the nation for warlike purposes more effectively than the laissez-faire west or the backward, agrarian east. And behind all this was a people possessing a far higher level of primary and technical education, an unrivaled university and scientific establishment, and chemical laboratories and research institutes without an equal.
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Europe, to repeat the quip of the day, had lost a mistress and gained a master. Under Bismarck’s astonishingly adroit handling, the Great Power system was going to be dominated by Germany for two whole decades after 1870; all roads, diplomats remarked, now led to Berlin. Yet as most people could see, it was not merely the cleverness and ruthlessness of the imperial chancellor which made Germany the most important power on the European continent. It was also German industry and technology, which boomed still faster once national unification had been accomplished; it was German science and education and local administration; and it was the impressive Prussian army. That the Second German Reich possessed major internal flaws, over which Bismarck constantly fretted, was scarcely noticed by outside observers. Every nation in Europe, even the isolationist British to some degree, felt affected by this new colossus. The Russians, although staying benevolently neutral during the 1870–1871 war and taking advantage
of the crisis in western Europe to improve their own position in the Black Sea,
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resented the fact that the European center of gravity was now located in Berlin and secretly worried about what Germany might do next. The Italians, who had occupied Rome in 1870 while the French (the pope’s protectors) were being crushed in Lorraine, steadily gravitated toward Berlin. So, too, did the Austro-Hungarian Empire (as it became known after Vienna’s 1867 compromise with the Hungarians), which hoped to find in the Balkans compensation for its loss of place in Germany and Italy—but was well aware that such an ambition might provoke a Russian reaction. Finally, the shocked and embittered French felt it necessary to reexamine and reform vast areas of government and society (education, science, railways, the armed forces, the economy) in what was to be a fruitless attempt to regain parity with their powerful neighbor across the Rhine.
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Both at the time and even more in retrospect, the year 1870 was viewed as a decisive watershed in European history.

On the other hand, perhaps because most countries felt the need to draw breath after the turbulences of the 1860s, and because statesmen operated cautiously under the new order, the
diplomatic
history of the Great Powers for the decade or so after 1871 was one of a search for stability. Being concerned respectively with the post-Civil War reconstruction and with the aftermath of the Meiji Revolution, neither the United States nor Japan were part of the “system,” which if anything was more Eurocentric than before. While there now existed a recast version of the “European pentarchy,” the balances were considerably altered from those which pertained after 1815. Prussia-Germany, under Bismarck’s direction, was now the most powerful and influential of the European states, in place of a Prussia which had always been the weakest. There was also another new power, united Italy, but its desperate condition of economic backwardness (especially the lack of coal) meant that it was never properly accepted into the major league of powers, even though it was obviously more important in European diplomacy than countries such as Spain or Sweden.
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What it did do, because of its pretensions in the Mediterranean and North Africa, was to move into a state of increasing rivalry with France, distracting the latter power and offering a useful future ally to Germany; secondly, because of its legacy of liberation wars against Vienna and its own ambitions in the western Balkans, Italy also disconcerted Austria-Hungary (at least until Bismarck had cemented over those tensions in the Austro-German-Italian “Triple Alliance” of 1882). This meant that neither Austria-Hungary nor France, the two chief “victims” of Germany’s rise, could concentrate its energies fully upon Berlin, since both now possessed a vigorous (if not too muscular) Italy in their rear. And whereas this fact simply added to the Austrian reasons for reconciling themselves to Germany, and becoming a quasi-satellite in consequence,
it also meant that even France’s greater degree of national strength and alliance worthiness
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was compromised in any future struggle against Berlin by the existence of a hostile and unpredictable Italy to the south.