by H M Hozier
Although the Austrians had been obliged to leave the railway, they had taken care to make it of as little use as possible to its subsequent possessors. All the engines and carriages had been sent away, and until Prague was occupied none could be brought by the Prussians to supply their place. So the line stood idle, and the station had a desolate look, made only more remarkable by the one or two officials of the indefatigable telegraph corps, who had occupied one of the rooms, and were at their work there early that morning flashing despatches and reports to the king’s staff, and receiving rapid answers which were to direct the marches of the troops.
A number of Austrian baggage waggons had after Königgrätz fallen into the hands of the conquerors, and, after being employed in helping to carry the wounded from the field on the 6th, joined in the long lines of carriages which followed the Prussian armies. They were easily distinguished in the line of march by their light yellow colour, which contrasted strongly with the dark blue with which all the Prussian military carriages are painted. Every hour showed how much more severely the Austrians had felt their defeat at Königgrätz than was at first supposed in the Prussian Army. The unopposed passage of the Elbe, the mission of Marshal Gablenz, the abandonment of the country south of Przelautsch, were successive proofs of the completeness of the Prussian victory.
The morale of the army had now risen high, and the soldiers were convinced that the Austrian troops could not stand against them—a feeling which was no contemptible augury of future victories. But, though the soldiers were confident in themselves, their arms, and their leaders, their confidence never stepped beyond just bounds; they were tender and kind to the wounded and prisoners, not only by attending to their wants, but by showing them much consideration, and never exulting over the victory in their presence, which could hardly be expected from men serving in the ranks. But the Prussian system of recruiting enlists in the army as privates men of high education and refined feelings, and these easily influence their comrades, who are naturally warm-hearted, to act kindly and charitably to the unfortunate.
On the 7th July the Prussian armies advanced from the Elbe. The crown prince moved from Pardubitz along the railway towards Brandeis, with the object of pushing towards Olmütz. Prince Frederick Charles, leaning slightly in the same direction, made for the road which leads from Pardubitz by Chrudim to Brünn. On the 7th he reached Hermanmestetz. The Army of the Elbe marched on the road which leads from Przelautsch to Iglau and Znaym.
The march of the 7th was very different from that of the 5th. The panic among the country people caused by the defeat of the Austrians at the Battle of Königgrätz did not extend into the country lying south of the Elbe, and here the inhabitants had not left their houses. All was busy and full of life, peasants were working in the fields, women and children were abundant in the villages, and the soldiers, who seemed to be supplied plentifully with money by their friends at home, for their pay is small, bought eggs, butter, milk, and poultry as they passed along, but in many cases they had little return for their money, for eggs are difficult to carry in crowded ranks, and butter is inclined to melt when stowed away in a knapsack, so that many found when they reached the halting place that their prudence in providing themselves with eatables was vain, and that they were disappointed of the luxuries they had meant to enjoy with their mid-day meal.
The march was little on the high road, but chiefly by country lanes, over ground covered with short, crisp grass, past water-mills sunk in the hollows by little streams, and through villages whose wide open greens covered with geese and ducks reminded one of England. From the top of every rise the country before the army could be seen stretching away in a wide rolling plain, and bounded by the dark blue line of mountains which, thirty miles distant, separates Bohemia from Moravia. The corn was rapidly ripening; but the day was cool, yet without rain, and the troops, marching easily, did not care to avail themselves of the water along the road, which was abundant, and which would have been so grateful on many former marches.
The town of Hermanmestetz is thoroughly Bohemian; few of even the better class of inhabitants could speak German. The signboards of the shops and inns were written only in Bohemian, and not in German also, as is generally the case further north. As soon as the troops marched in and were dismissed from their parades, a rush was made at the shops. The soldiers crowded in at the doors and up to the counters, calling loudly for tobacco and cigars. These were not to be had in any quantity, but coffee was plentiful at first, though the whole in the town was soon bought Then arose difficulties about money, for the soldiers did not yet thoroughly understand the Austrian coinage, and the shopkeepers tried to take the utmost advantage of their ignorance; but the men protested loudly against flagrant cases of imposition, and, amid a great deal of noise and loud talking, the bargains were concluded generally considerably to the advantage of the dealer.
Every taproom was filled by an importunate crowd eager for food, beer, and wine; knapsacks were piled on the benches, rifles stood thickly in the corners, and their owners pressed round the bar, each trying by dint of noise to secure the services of the landlord for himself. But though they were hungry and thirsty, the soldiers were always good-humoured. Differences of opinion often arose as to the comparative value of kreutzers and silber groschen; but when the dispute ran high the landlord called in the assistance of his wife, and then almost invariably the soldier had to retire worsted from the contest, exposing discontentedly to his comrades the small handful of little coins he had received in change for a dollar. As soon as it became dark all noise ceased and all bustle was stilled. The men disappeared to go to sleep. Some lay in the houses on straw, others in sheds, many in the gardens, for the house accommodation was not sufficient for them, and many seemed wisely to prefer the summer air to a crowded room. Thus the town, before so noisy, grew perfectly still, and no sound was heard except the monotonous step of a sentry or the uneasy neigh of some restive horse; but the arms piled, with the bayonets fixed, beside each house, with the knapsacks laid close to the butts packed and ready to be instantly taken up, told that the soldiers were ready, and that the least alarm would fill the streets with armed men ready to march.
The king came to Pardubitz on the morning of the 7th, held a meeting of the principal generals, and probably the future plan of the campaign was then discussed. It was still uncertain whether the two armies were making for the line of railway which runs by Brünn to Vienna, or whether they were moving towards Olmütz.
The king remained on the 8th at Pardubitz, where it was determined that the Second Army should move against Olmütz with the first corps d’armée and the cavalry corps leading. This advanced guard was if possible to feel the enemy, and discover what amount of his army Benedek still held in the entrenched camp and what troops he had sent to the south. A serious attack on the fortress was not, however, contemplated. Any retreat of the Second Army, which might become necessary, was to be made, not in the direction of the First Army, but on the county of Glatz, with which the Second Army now formed a line of communication.
The First and Second Armies, on the 8th, moved forwards in a south-easterly direction; the crown prince, with the Second Army, marched that morning in the direction of Mährisch Trübau, and halted for the night somewhere short of that town. The First Army, under Prince Frederick Charles, was that evening scattered round Chrast; the 8th division, under General Horne, was in the town itself, the main body along the road towards Mährisch Trübau; the 7th was a little to the south at Zumberg; the 6th at Kamenitz, a village still further to the south; and the cavalry, marching by roads more to the southwards still, covered the right flank of the army. General Herwarth von Bittenfeld, with his corps, was moving on Iglau. Eight battalions had been detached to Prague, and that town was occupied on the morning of this day, the 8th.
Marshal Gablenz passed through the outposts again the same morning, and went to Pardubitz to see the king, as a commissioner from the Austrian Government, to treat for a suspension of h
ostilities. He was received by General von Moltke, but his proposals could not be entertained, and his second mission was equally unsuccessful as his first He submitted that a suspension of hostilities should be concluded, which should last for at least eight weeks and for at most eight months; that during this truce the troops of both nations should retain their actual positions, and a girdle of two miles in width between the outposts be observed as neutral ground.
In return the Austrian commissioner proposed that the fortresses of Josephstadt and Königgrätz should be handed over to the Prussians, but without their garrisons and matériel of war. It was not in the interest of the Prussian Army after a hardly won victory, and, in its favourable circumstances, to grant such an armistice, especially as it appeared certain that Austria did not wish to definitely conclude a peace, but only to gain time to bring up her Army of the South from Italy. The passage of Marshal Gablenz through the divisions led to many reports of the speedy termination of the war, which were more or less credited.
In the meantime, amid rumours of probable peace, the army still continued its steady advance, and its march was conducted with the same precautions and the same circumspection as if the campaign was only beginning, and as if an unbroken enemy was in front, ready to take advantage of the slightest error. Advanced guards were sent forward, who carefully felt the way for the marching columns, sending scouts to the top of every rise, who, standing out sharp against the sky, peered into the distance; riflemen moved in dotted lines through the fields at an even pace with the troops marching on the road, and trod through the corn as carefully as if they were sportsmen beating a covert, or, slipping into a thicket, now appeared, now disappeared in the foliage much like hounds drawing for a fox.
The troops on the road pushed along as steadily and perseveringly as on the first day they entered Saxony. The infantry, with their trousers turned up and boots often drawn on outside them, trudged along merrily, and seemed little to feel the heavy yellow cowskin knapsacks and mess tins for cooking which they carried on their backs. Their helmets had suffered in the campaign more than any other part of their equipment; many had lost the spike on the top, carried away by a bullet or the splinter of a shell at the Battle of Königgrätz. Some looked as if they had been knocked off in the hurry of action, and had been marched over heavily by the ranks behind. The belts showed a want of pipe-clay, and the boots had lost all traces of blacking; but the barrels of the rifles and the blades of the bayonets were all bright and clean, and shone out cold and gray against the dark blue uniforms. The artillery horses, a little thin, and with rather prominent ribs, from hard work and scarce forage, stepped briskly out, and almost without stretching their traces the straight, steel-barrelled guns rolled along behind them, looking on the road a mere plaything to be drawn by six horses; but when the ground was heavy from falling rain, as on the morning before Königgrätz, it needed nearly all the strength of the team to get a gun over the fields uphill, and then horses were often wanting, for their bodies, larger than those of men, were more liable to be struck by shells or bullets, and many were killed or badly wounded as soon as a battery went under fire.
After the great battle, the positions that had been occupied by the field batteries on either side could be traced by the numbers of dead horses lying where the limbers and waggons had stood. Often twenty or thirty lay dead in a line near together along the front of the battery, and others limped about near them, and though always moving never tried to go away from their dead companions. They, too, were soon stretched upon the ground, for the krankenträger, looking for the sick, mercifully placed a carbine behind the ear of every wounded animal, and quickly put it out of pain. The mass of the cavalry scoured the country to the south of the main army, keeping watch and ward over its right flank, but here and there a few turned up in the line of march, generally a detachment of some troopers guarding waggons. These detachments were of all kinds of horsemen,—cuirassiers with their white flannel coats braced tightly in by the cuirass, and with heavy-looking high jack-boots, were followed quickly by some few men of the Ziethen hussars, with short crimson jackets, or by some of the Weimar light cavalry, with their light blue and silver uniforms looking none the worse for exposure, while every column was headed by Uhlans, the black and white flags of whose lances waved with an almost funereal aspect above their smart caps and gay red or yellow facings.
The army marched in several columns, and from every rise could be seen the different lines creeping like long blue serpents over the country. Dipping into hollows, twisting through villages, twining among trees, appearing and disappearing through woods and thickets, they stretched for many a long mile from front to rear. Always looking steadily ahead, they pushed on with the men’s faces against the sun, and seemed to be bending towards the fortress of Olmütz, under the walls of which the Austrians were reported to have an entrenched camp, where there were said to be over 100,000 fighting men, with 400 pieces of artillery ensconced in fortifications. Collected here, the Austrian troops, it was said, meant to bar the road southwards from the Prussians; if these passed on disregarding them, to issue out, and, seizing the communications of the army, cut off from it all its supplies of ammunition and food from the north.
Again, on the 8th, the line of March lay through a country rich and abundant in supplies, and from which the natives had not fled away; and again the columns moved through country lanes, in some places shadowed in by fruit trees, in others leading over breezy uplands where the limestone rocks cropped up close to the surface of the ground, and left but a scanty-soil to nourish the short grass which grew thick upon it Here and there the rocks cropped out of the ground and rose up some twenty feet high, forming grotesquely-shaped natural grottoes, round which clumps of tall silver fir clustered, and at the foot of the trees, spread in great profusion, wild roses, sweetbriar, foxglove, and nightshade. All the farmhouses and cottages were built of brick, thickly coated with clean white plaster, and in the smallest hamlet there was always a church with a steeple surmounted by the large globe-like top, often gilt, which seems peculiar to Sclavonic countries.
No wooden cottages were to be seen here, for the people are richer than those north of the Elbe, and the army left behind it, when it crossed that river, the pine-wood huts, so many of which had been lately destroyed by the flames kindled by the fire of the artillery. The houses, both outside and inside, were beautifully clean; the furniture was of plain deal, without paint, scoured to a whiteness which is unknown in Northern Bohemia; the brass handles of the drawers and the steel and iron round the fireplaces shone bright from much polishing, and reflected back distorted images of the soldiers, who, in their dusty clothes and heavy boots, dirty from marching, looked much out of place in the houses in which they were billeted.
The inhabitants sighed sadly over the war, for their crops had been injured; soldiers of both armies had been billeted in their houses, for the Austrians retreated through this part of the country two days before; and some of them had sons or brothers in the Austrian service. But there was no ill-will between them and the Prussian soldiers. Indeed, the latter were always so good-natured that it would have been difficult even for churls to quarrel with them, and such the natives of the valley of the Elbe are not. They would have preferred peace to war; they suffered deeply in having their houses turned into barracks, their cornfields into bivouacs, their barns and outhouses into stables for war horses; but they did not blame the soldiers for injuries for the cause of which the latter were as innocent as the inhabitants themselves; they gave the men what they could; nor did the villagers and peasants attempt to impose upon the soldiers, though the town shopkeepers, more keenly alive to their own interests, generally managed to make a profit out of the difference of the Prussian and Austrian coinage.
The headquarters of the First Army were on the night of the 8th established in a monastery at Chrast. The priests were still there, but gave up the greater part of the house to Prince Frederick Charles and his staff. Military waggons a
nd horses were picketed inside the usually quiet monastery close; soldier servants went whistling up and down the corridors and among the cells, saddle-bags and valises were bundled upstairs, and the monastery would soon have been very like a barrack were it not that the priests kept flitting about, good-naturedly proffering food and drink to both officers and soldiers; for, although they looked on both as the enemies of their country, and, perhaps, even of their Church, they knew that the army had marched far and fast, and they practised that charity which should be the connecting link among all Christian creeds.
From the church close by the monastery, as a centre, the little town spreads out, its white houses glistening brightly in the sun, along four streets, almost at right angles to each other. Between and behind the houses lay little gardens, in which grew most English greenhouse flowers; vines were trained in trellis-work against the walls, and beyond the fields stretched away, covered with heavy crops ripening for harvest; and between the cornfields lay long belts of gaudy-coloured poppies, which are cultivated in this country in great quantities. The church bell sounding slowly, probably for vespers, for the day was Sunday, and a few women, with shawls in Bohemian fashion thrown over their bare heads, disappearing into the church door, and just seen within crossing themselves with the holy water, would have made the whole scene one of perfect peace; but the piles of bayonets by every door, the perpetual soldiers bustling along the streets, the cantonniers who had established their itinerant stalls close outside the church door, and were squabbling with soldiers over the value of black cigars or schnapps, told that this smiling little town was . the headquarters of an army which had just marched from a battlefield, and was pressing forward again to force its enemy to battle; for the policy of the Prussian Army was now to cling to the heels of the retreating Austrians and to force them to fight before they had time to reorganise their forces. On the 9th July the whole force was again moved towards the south-east.