The troops marched in three columns towards the fortress of Josephstadt (Josefov) on the upper Elbe. At their head was Ludwig August von Benedek. The dapper Feldherr was sixty-one years old in June 1866. He had, in a succession of battles, earned the reputation of a brave corps commander. But he had never before commanded a large army. He had, it is true, more experience of fighting than his Prussian counterpart, General von Moltke. Unlike Moltke, however, Benedek was unacquainted with the higher realms of military art. “I am too little the scientifically arrogant strategist,” he once confessed. “I conduct the business of war according to quite simple rules and am no friend to complicated combinations.”
Benedek had, too, another weakness. He had passed the greatest part of his career with the Austrian Army of Italy. He knew, he said, “every tree as far as Milan.” But his knowledge of Austria’s northern frontier was slight. “So now I am to study the geography of Prussia!” he exclaimed upon learning that he was to be Feldherr. “How can I take in things like that at my age?” “It would really be better,” he told his wife, “if a bullet hit me.”
Into such hands was the fate of Austria confided. Benedek knew that in order to defeat the Prussians he must swiftly engage and dispatch the enemy’s First Army, commanded by the Red Prince, Friedrich Karl. If he failed to destroy this army quickly enough, the Prussian Second Army, commanded by Crown Prince Friedrich, would fall upon his right flank while he was contending with the Red Prince. He would find himself caught in the Prussian pincers.
Everything depended on the boldness and celerity of Benedek; but he seemed to put off the fatal reckoning. The Red Prince drew closer, and the Feldherr fell back upon the fortress of Könnigrätz on the Elbe. There he convened a council of war. The officers who gathered round the board were gloomy. The council broke up, and Benedek wired Franz Josef. “I beg Your Majesty urgently,” he said, “to make peace at any price. Catastrophe for the army is unavoidable.” The Kaiser rejected the advice: the dignity of the House of Austria required that the Army of the North hazard a battle. Benedek recovered his equanimity and prepared to fight. He determined to make his stand on the banks of the Bistritz, a river that flowed some eight miles northwest of Könnigrätz. Here, amid orchards and corn fields, stood a little Bohemian village of pinewood cottages and watermills.
It was called Sadowa.
The Austrians had the vantage of ground; and they improved such natural defenses as the terrain afforded by digging trenches and throwing up breastworks.
In the meantime the Prussian high command arrived by rail at Reichenberg (Liberec) in Bohemia. Bismarck, upon reaching the castle where the King and his suite were to lodge, was astonished to find it guarded by only a few hundred train-soldiers with rusty carbines. Enemy cavalry, he knew, lay but a few leagues off. He turned to General von Moltke, who by royal edict had been made strategic mastermind of the campaign, and asked him whether this was not dangerous.
“Ja,” Moltke replied, “in war everything is dangerous.”
Bismarck found himself scorned by the military men as a trembling civilian, one who had never fleshed his sword in battle. He was, indeed, no soldier. As a young man he had attempted to evade military duty. “I feel pain when I raise my right arm,” he claimed. (Bismarck never was one for saluting.) His experience of soldiering was limited to the garrison duty he had been forced to perform at Potsdam. Nevertheless, the man of iron was wounded by the aspersion of cowardice. He quitted the castle and took lodgings in the town, which lay open to the enemy. He was bored and nervous. In a letter to his wife he begged her to send him cigars, a French novel, and a big revolver.
The campaign moved rapidly towards its catastrophe. On the evening of July 2, the Prussian high command learned that the Austrians were massed in force on the opposite bank of the Bistritz. Moltke, who had retired early, was roused from his bed. “Gott sei dank!” he said. God be thanked! The moment was at hand. He had worried that Benedek would shrink from a decisive contest. But the struggle, it now appeared, would be short and tumultuous. The Prussian commanders passed a sleepless night making their final dispositions, and at four o’clock the Red Prince’s First Army was in motion.
The morning of the third dawned raw and rainy. A mist overhung the valley. In the Austrian camp Benedek wrote a last letter to his wife. His nerves, he admitted, were stretched thin, but he predicted that all would be well when the cannon began to thunder. He then went out among the troops and looked his soldiers in the eye. They were ready. At seven o’clock the Prussian trumpets sounded, and the Uhlans went forward, their lances and banners waving in the rain. Next came the Prussian infantrymen in gray-green field uniforms. Few wore the spiked Pickelhaubehelmet; most wore field caps. Bismarck himself appeared in a long gray coat and cuirassier’s helmet.
Moltke, who was coming down with a cold, put aside his pocket handkerchief and ordered the Red Prince to attack the Austrian line. A fierce artillery bombardment heralded the offensive. The guns flashed, and in a short time the village of Sadowa was in flames. The Prussian assault was valiant; but it failed to dislodge the enemy. The slaughter was great, and a number of Prussian units were almost wholly annihilated.
At noon, the Austrian line appeared to be as solid as ever. In Prussian headquarters there was consternation. Moltke alone was serene. “Your Majesty,” he assured the King, “will today win not only the battle but the campaign.” The Chief of the General Staff enjoyed the reputation of a man who never promised unless he meant to pay; but Wilhelm was unconvinced. About this time Bismarck surveyed the field with a telescope. He was puzzled by the appearance, in the distance, of a series of plough furrows. The furrows, curiously enough, appeared to be moving. “Those are not plough furrows,” he exclaimed at last, “the spaces are not equal.” He handed the glass to Moltke. What Bismarck had at first taken to be plough furrows were in fact soldiers of the Prussian Second Army. Crown Prince Friedrich had arrived.
“The campaign is decided,” Moltke told the King, “and in accordance with Your Majesty’s desires!” Wilhelm, who saw before him only the fog of war, continued to profess doubt. “No,” Moltke said firmly, “the success is complete. Vienna lies at Your Majesty’s feet.”
The arrival of Crown Prince Friedrich and the Second Prussian Army decided the battle. Nearly half a million men were soon in full grapple. The right wing of the Austrian army collapsed. The Prussians took the Austrian works by storm, and drove their opponents from position to position. The nerves of Habsburg military discipline broke down as soldiers deserted their standards. “Oh, you cowards!” the officers cried. “Stand there, you yellow dogs!” Benedek, informed that his army was in full retreat, was at first incredulous. “Don’t be silly,” he said. He galloped off with his staff to survey the field for himself. He soon found himself under a withering fire. A number of his officers fell dead from their saddles.
The Feldherr now proved his worth. Nothing so became Benedek at the battle of Sadowa as the manner in which he lost it. All the alacrity of spirit which he had wanted in the days leading up to the contest he instantly recovered. Careless of his life, he went among his men and strove by an example of fearlessness to turn the tide. His troops, inspired by his courage, made a gallant stand. Jaeger horns sounded, and military bands played “God Save the Kaiser.” The Austrians moved forward with bayonets fixed. They marched on, unflinching, even as their ranks were decimated by the Prussian guns.
It was too late. Incapable of further resistance, the Austrians retired in the direction of Könnigrätz. The sluices of the fortress were opened to forestall pursuit by the enemy, and the moats filled with water. Many were drowned in the inundation. Benedek himself, guarded by a squadron of Uhlans, crossed the Elbe with what remained of his staff. His ruin was complete; there was nothing left but to despair and die. Moltke, in the pride of fortune and victory, did not neglect to pity his vanquished rival. “A defeated Feldherr!” he exclaimed. “Oh, if civilians had even the remotest idea of what that means! . . . Oh,
when I try to imagine it to myself!” The Chief of the General Staff was by this time feverish with fatigue, illness, and the intoxication of success. While his soldiers sang Nun Danket (“Now thank we all our God. . .”) Moltke retired to his bed.
Paris and Bohemia, July 1866
THE CHTEAU OVERLOOKING the Seine squeaked and gibbered with ghosts. In the neo-classical galleries of Saint-Cloud, Marie-Antoinette had once dallied, and Napoleon Bonaparte had once plotted. The château was said to have been Bonaparte’s favorite residence. Certainly it was his most fortunate. It was here that he had, in November 1799, carried out the coup d’état that created a dynasty. It was here, sixty-seven years later, that his nephew learned of the battle that presaged the end of the House of Bonaparte. Many years later, the aged Eugénie recalled that fateful time. It “still quivers within me,” the fallen Empress said, “like a sensitive nerve.”
The period after Sadowa was “the date of doom for the Empire.”
“It is France,” people said, “that is beaten at Sadowa.” In his heart Louis-Napoleon knew the words to be true, and in the days and weeks that followed the battle he seemed like one in a trance, powerless to avert his fate. Drouyn de Lhuys, the French Foreign Minister, urged the Emperor to act forcefully to retrieve the honor of France. If, Drouyn said, France imposed armed mediation on Austria and Prussia and brokered the peace, the Emperor could yet regain the prestige which Bismarck had wrested from him at Sadowa. The monarch nodded with a smile of apathy, and a peremptory telegram was dashed off to the Prussians.
The next day a council of state was held in the château. The Emperor presided. The Empress was present. Drouyn again pressed for a policy of forcefulness. It was not enough for France to proclaim herself an arbiter. She must make a demonstration of military might. The Empress spoke next, and in French tinged with a coloring that betrayed her Spanish birth she embraced the policy of Drouyn. France, she said, must be strong. She turned to Marshal Randon, the Minister of War, and asked whether the army was in a position to make a show of force on the Rhine.
“Yes,” Randon replied. “We can concentrate 80,000 men on the Rhine immediately, and 250,000 within twenty days.”
The Emperor said nothing.
The Marquis de La Valette, the Minister of the Interior, took advantage of the silence to speak. He utterly opposed the policy of Drouyn. If France fought Prussia, she must, he said, become the ally of Austria. Austria was the enemy of Italy, France’s friend. The liberation of the Italians from the tyranny of Austria, on the nationalist principles so dear to the Emperor’s heart, was one of the historic achievements of the Empire. How could the Emperor now turn on his heel, abandon the Italians, throw up the ideal of nationalism, and embrace the arch enemy Austria, the breaker of nations?
Louis-Napoleon, in the depths of his fatigue, seemed struck by La Valette’s arguments, or so the Empress thought; but still he said nothing. La Valette went on. A war with Prussia was, he said, unnecessary. Berlin, he argued, would be generous in compensating a friend who by remaining neutral had made possible its victory. France would get all that she needed without the waste of war.
The Empress listened to the Minister with mounting impatience. At last she leapt to her feet. “When the Prussian armies are no longer tied up in Bohemia,” she said, “and can turn back against ourselves, Bismarck will simply laugh at our claims!”
Despairing though he was, Louis-Napoleon tentatively inclined to the warlike counsels of Drouyn and the Empress. He ordered a French force to march to the Rhine, and he requested that the lawmakers of the Corps Législatif be summoned to approve the monies needed for mobilization.
But the Emperor’s resolution was hollow. Later in the day he reversed his decision.
“I am not ready for war,” he said.
Vienna, July 1866
WHILE THE BATTLE RAGED at Sadowa, the Hofburg was tranquil. The household guards paced back and forth before their yellow-and-white sentinel boxes. Footmen in silver braid and black knee breeches stood at polished doors. Soldiers of the Imperial Bodyguard watched over the private apartments of the Emperor with halberds in their hands. The meticulously regulated ballet was in keeping with the character of the imperial choreographer. “No breach of traditional court rules, however slight, ever escaped” the notice of Franz Josef, his adjutant, General Baron von Margutti, said. “What do you mean by not being dressed according to the regulations?” the Kaiser once demanded of a lieutenant reporting for orderly duty. “You’ve no buttons on your sleeves. Didn’t you know it?”
“No, Your Majesty, indeed I did not.”
“Then you don’t know the regulations. It’s monstrous.”
The regulations. Emanating from the Hofburg, they extended to the remotest corners of Franz Josef’s Empire. The intricate web of rules and commands was assiduously maintained by an army of policemen and paper-pushers, the foremost of whom was the Emperor himself. A continuous stream, in fact a flood, of missives issued daily from the desk of the All Highest. “You can take it from me,” Franz Josef said, “that in important matters written communications are not only the safest but also the quickest method.” Every day the Kaiser sat at his desk writing orders, instructions, minutes, memoranda. He made notes touching every military review and special audience. The habit became so ingrained that he committed even the fleeting impressions of the day to slips of paper, setting forth in a cryptic shorthand the names of people he liked and ministers he did not want to see. “Wekerle—here again already—ach Gott! not this time! no! no!” Papers covered in the neat hand of the Emperor piled up on the desks of his ministers, adjutants, chamberlains, equerries. From their desks more paper issued, the life blood of the immense bureaucracy of the Habsburgs.
On this summer evening, however, all the paper was black.
As with every other part of the Kaiser’s day, the dinner hour was regulated by fixed customs. As soon as the settings were laid, Franz Josef came to inspect the table. He took up a knife, and looked for his reflection in the blade. A telegram was brought in. The commander of the fortress at Könnigrätz was reporting that the fugitive remnant of the Austrian army was clamoring to be admitted to the citadel. Such news was sufficiently disturbing; but Franz Josef did not yet give up hope. Then came a telegram from Feldherr Benedek himself.
“General rout.”
Franz Josef turned as white as his uniform.
The news spread fast. Beyond the gates of the palace astonishment was, at first, curiously mingled with apathy, and even with levity. Men and women sat up late eating and drinking in the dining gardens of the Prater, unmoved by the disaster that had befallen the Army of the North. The music of Strauss wafted over the frivolous scene, and prostitutes with painted faces plied their trade. The nonchalance appalled those of a graver cast of mind. “Does not such scum deserve its fate?” one onlooker asked as he gazed upon the indolent sensuality of the Prater. But the spirit of blasé indifference could not long be maintained even by the most cynical, and by degrees insouciance was succeeded by terror. A “gloom almost amounting to despair,” one diplomat wrote, “took possession of the city.”
The terrified populace fixed angry eyes on the architects of its humiliation. When the Kaiser drove out to Schönbrunn, the summer palace of the Habsburgs, precautionary measures were taken, and he was for the first time in his reign escorted by a detachment of Household Cavalry. The silence of the crowd was broken by shouts of “Long live the Emperor Maximilian.” Such tributes to the younger brother, who was now in Mexico, were thought to annoy Franz Josef intensely.
The imperial scribes made a feeble attempt to defend the régime. In the Wiener Abendpost apologists for the court contended that the appointment of Benedek as Feldherr had been forced upon the Kaiser by public opinion. The admission reassured no one, and only strengthened the impression that the government was incompetent. The Kaiser, sensible of the danger in which he stood, condescended to receive a delegation of his subjects. Zelinka, the Mayor of Vienna, told
the Kaiser that his constituents feared that the city would soon be besieged by the Prussians. Franz Josef replied that the “trenches were very far away”
But they were coming closer.
The Prussian Second Army marched on Olmütz. The railway and telegraph lines which ran through that city were severed, and Vienna was cut off from the north. The Prussian First Army continued its advance and was soon less than sixty miles from the capital. The population of the city was swollen by an influx of refugees desperately seeking to escape the invaders. Foreign nationals, fearful for their lives, crowded the lobbies of embassies and legations. Outwardly the Kaiser displayed a serene confidence; but this appearance of strength was belied by the trembling prudence of his bureaucrats. Steamships in the Danube were loaded with the ancient treasures of the dynasty, and quantities of gold bullion were sent away from the danger.
At length the Prussians were at the gates of the city. The massive armies lay down on the Marchfeld, the great plain east of the capital. From the belfries of Vienna frightened residents saw a line of tents and standards that stretched for miles. The left flank of the invading army extended almost as far as Pressburg (Bratislava). A “sickening expectation” prevailed, one observer said, that the victorious Prussians would enter the city in a matter of days.
Bohemia, July 1866
AS HE GAZED ON the corpses of Sadowa, Bismarck thought not of his revolution but of his son. “It makes me sick,” he said, “when I reflect that Herbert may be lying like that some day.” The champion of blood and iron was appalled by the sight of real blood, but sentimentality vied, in that labyrinthical brain, with the demands of an iron will. When, shortly after the battle, he received the telegram informing him that Louis-Napoleon sought to impose mediation on the belligerents, he was indignant. This was a violation of the promise of neutrality the French Emperor had made at Biarritz. “I will be revenged on the Gauls,” he said, “when opportunity offers.”
Forge of Empires Page 35