by H M Hozier
Time was getting on; and before the front attack was developed, the sun, standing high up in the heavens and directly south, showed that mid-day had arrived. In a few minutes an Austrian officer came out from the Blumenau position with a flag of trace, and advanced towards the Prussian lines. He was met by a Prussian officer, to whom he reported that an armistice had been agreed upon, to date from mid-day, and that it was already past the hour. In a few minutes the signal to cease firing was sounded along the Prussian ranks, and the combat was broken off. The sudden silence was curious and abrupt; there were none of the dropping shots or single occasional reports in which a cannonade generally dies away; in a moment the roar of the artillery and the patter of small arms ceased, and a curious hum of conversation rose from the astonished soldiers.
At first the Austrians would not believe that their retreat was cut off, and that they had been in such imminent danger of being captured, for no report had been sent up from the rear, and they still thought that they commanded the road to Preszburg. But they were soon convinced that they were really surrounded, when, on sending back, it was found that Prussian troops were drawn up across the only line of retreat for their artillery.
The Austrians lost in the combat between five hundred and six hundred men, of whom one hundred were taken prisoners, and over three hundred were wounded. The Prussian loss was reported only one hundred killed and wounded.
To speculate on what would have been is generally unprofitable, especially so in war; but as the Austrians fully acknowledge that they were only saved by a lucky fortune from a terrible disaster, it may not be too much for impartial observers to believe that the action was virtually gained by the Prussians, and that if it had continued all the Austrian artillery must have been taken, and probably the greater part of their infantry captured; for there is no road except the one occupied by Bose by which the guns could have been withdrawn from Blumenau; and though there is a rough country lane by which men on foot could from Kaltenbrun reach the banks of the Danube, it is extremely doubtful if the Prussians would not have been in Preszburg before the Austrian infantry could have gained that line by this roundabout route, and then their capture was certain.
The number of men engaged on each side was about equal. The Prussians had two divisions, which together consisted of twenty-five battalions, in the field, with forty-eight guns, but twelve of these were always in reserve. The Austrians had the 1st, 2nd, and 4th brigades of their second corps d’armée and Mendel’s brigade of the tenth corps engaged, and had forty guns.
Had this action been allowed to proceed, and had it been a victory for the Prussians, it would have been won, not by the needle-gun so much as by the brilliant dispositions made by General Franzecky for turning his enemy’s right flank. This was confessed by an Austrian officer, who, talking to a Prussian officer after the armistice was declared, said, “Your needle-gun may be a terrible weapon, and we know by experience how well it shoots; but it has not been so bad for us as your generals, who have a most diabolical power of manoeuvring.”
Directly the action was over, General Stülpnagel and Count Hasler rode into Preszburg to settle with the commandant of that place the line of demarcation which should be observed by the troops during the armistice. The Prussian troops were all in front of the line that was agreed upon, and ought, according to the strict letter of the law, to have withdrawn at once, but it was late in the day when the line was fixed. The Austrian officer consented that for the night the Prussians should remain where they were, and retire to their new ground in the morning.
Then occurred a curious scene. The men of Bose’s Prussian brigade, who had been planted across the Preszburg road, and a few hours before had been standing ready, rifle in hand, to fire upon the retreating Austrian battalions, were surrounded by groups of those very Austrian soldiers whom they had been waiting to destroy. The men of the two nations mingled together, exchanged tobacco, drank out of each other’s flasks, talked and laughed over the war in groups equally composed of blue and white uniforms, cooked their rations at the same fires, and that night Austrian and Prussian battalions lay down bivouacked close together, without fear and in perfect security. On the morrow all along the line of the front of the Prussian Army the divisions took up the positions they were to occupy during the temporary peace.
Early on the morning of the 22nd, commissioners from the Austrian and Prussian Armies had a meeting at a small village between Gänserndorf and the Danube, in order to decide upon a line which should, during the armistice, form the boundary between the troops of the two nations. The Prussian commissioners were General von Podbielsky, of the king’s headquarter staff, and Major von Capprivi, of the staff of Prince Frederick Charles; their colleagues from the Austrian camp were General von John and some of his assistants in the Austrian headquarter staff. After some hours of consultation the line of demarcation was decided upon. It started on the Prussian right at Krems, on the Danube; followed the north bank of the river down as far as Stockerau; from that town ran up the curve of the Gollsbach rivulet to the neighbourhood of Fellabrun; then, by taking a line to the village of Weinsteig, it struck the Rossbach rivulet close to that village, followed this stream as far as Leopoldsdorf, then ran along the road between that village and Lasse, and was then drawn along an imaginary straight line to the railway bridge over the March, near Marchegg.
On the left side of the March a straight line from the railway bridge carried it to the village of Bistritz, whence it followed the eastern edge of the Fahren Wald till it struck the main road from Skalitz to Tyrnau.
It was further agreed that commanders of detachments and of troops left to mask fortresses should decide with the commanders of the troops opposite to them upon the lines of demarcation to be observed in the vicinity of their own commands.
The Prussian cavalry corps, under the command of Prince Albrecht, was pushed forward to the line of the Roszbach, and had its headquarters in the neighbourhood of Deutsch Wagram, whence the fortifications of Florisdorf could be seen, but their details could not be made out.
While the action of Blumenau was actually being fought. General Degenfeld and Count Karolyi, the former Austrian ambassador at Berlin, crossed the space between the outposts on the other side of the March, and went to the king’s headquarters, empowered by the Austrian Government to conclude a treaty of peace.
At the time of the suspension of hostilities, the Prussian armies on the Marchfeld and between Vienna and Brünn consisted of the three corps of Prince Frederick Charles, the cavalry corps of Prince Albrecht, three divisions under General Herwarth, and three and a half corps under the crown prince. These formed a force of about two hundred and sixty-five thousand combatants. Behind these lay the first reserve corps under General Mülbe at Brünn, half a corps from the crown prince’s army in front of Olmütz, and near the same fortress Knobelsdorf ’s corps, forming together an additional force of about fifty-five thousand men. The corps of Knobelsdorf had occupied the Austrian town of Troppau on the 9th July, and had then been pushed forward to observe Olmütz and garrison the line of railway to Brünn. Count Stölberg was left in Silesia with about ten thousand men to watch the Austrian detachments in Gallicia. The division of Landwehr of the Guard was in Prague. Detachments of Landwehr held Saxony, and garrisoned the capital and fortresses of Prussia.
On the western theatre of war, Manteuffel had sixty thousand men in the field. The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg had about twenty-five thousand. Five thousand men held Frankfort and Hanau, and Landwehr garrisoned Nassau, Hesse-Cassel, and Hanover. In all, Prussia had at the lowest computation five hundred and twenty thousand fighting men in the field—a stupendous force to be supplied by a country which with its allies did not possess a population of twenty million inhabitants. Besides these, there were depôt and garrison troops retained in the provinces, which numbered at least one hundred thousand additional soldiers.
CHAPTER 4: The Truce
During the armistice of five days, the Prussian tro
ops remained in the Marchfeld.
On the morning of the 23rd, the troops who had been the previous day engaged in the combat of Blumenau marched back to their positions on their own side of the line of demarcation which was to be observed by the Prussians during the armistice. Between this line and that up to which the Austrian outposts were pushed forward extended a narrow belt of neutral ground, on which the soldiers of either side were forbidden to tread, and where the labourers were cutting the corn and carrying in the harvest as peaceably and diligently as if there was no enemy in their country, and no Prussian vedettes were posted along the course of the Roszbach. The troops, not ungrateful for a little idleness after their hard work, lay billeted in the villages between Ebenthal and the line of demarcation, knapsacks were unpacked, and their motley contents laid out on the banks by the roadside to be dried and aired in the sun.
The artillery ammunition went under a careful inspection; groups of soldier-tailors sitting together under the trees patched up holes made in uniforms either by the wear and tear of the campaign, or by the too near approach of a bullet or the splinter of a shell. Everywhere through the cantonments there was a listless, idle air of careless comfort and rest, such as can only be thoroughly appreciated by those who have been marching and fighting for weeks past under a burning sun or heavy soaking rain; except where the sentinel paced up and down before some cottage improvised into a guardhouse, where the regimental colours were deposited, or where the vedette sat mounted, with pistol in hand, peering as carefully towards Florisdorf and the Danube as if there were no truce agreed upon, and as if he expected every moment to have to give the signal of the approach of the enemy’s columns.
No one who bore any look of being a spy was allowed to pass either out of the lines or into them, and so suspicious were the sentries that the country people going out to or returning from work had to give satisfactory accounts of themselves before they were allowed to pass. The Austrians were equally careful on their side, so that no communication could take place with Vienna; and the Stephanenthurm, which looked down on the city where so many would like to go if only for an hour, only tantalized those who could see it from the line of outposts, and drew forth many exclamations of impatience from those who fretted and fumed at being tied down to the flat plain of the Marchfeld, in the very sight of the capital, where many little luxuries which were greatly missed and wanted in the army could so easily have been purchased.
In the meantime the military authorities were not idle in their preparations for the continuance of the campaign, in case the diplomatists, who were working in mysterious silence at Nikolsburg, should fail to come to terms upon the conditions of peace. The railway was crowded with trains all the way from Görlitz to Lundenburg, which were bringing up reserves, heavy guns, stores, pontoons, and all the other materials which would be required for the passage of the Danube. The armistice had not done the Prussians much harm, even if the war should have broken out afresh, except by stopping the action of Blumenau, for they would probably have had to pause in the middle of active operations to await the arrival of their siege guns and their bridge material, even if there had been no suspension of hostilities; and the five days which gave rest to the battalions in the front of the army also afforded time to get forward the immense train of boats, pontoons, and planks which the engineers would have required if they had been called upon to throw bridges across the broad, rapid stream which flows between the Marchfeld and Vienna, although the Danube is not so difficult to cross as most rivers with an equal amount of water, for it is broken up into many channels, enclosing numerous islands which much aid the construction of a bridge.
Now in the different billets many stories were related of individual prowess and personal bravery during the campaign. There was not a battalion or a squadron which had not its special hero, about whom some particular anecdote was recorded; no two opinions were stated concerning the organisation and equipment of the different branches of the army from those who have had the most practical proofs of the working of them, by being dependent upon them in the real work of war. There were no grumblers; and though the staff officers, who observed carefully every incident of the campaign, with a view to profit by its experience for further improvement and for further progress, had noted many things which were changed or adopted as soon as peace gave time and opportunity, the regimental officers were well content with everything, and were ready to stand or fall by their conviction that the Prussian army was the most smoothly-worked piece of machinery in the whole world.
It was curious to find from those who had taken part in the cavalry fighting that the epaulette, which has of late been discarded in many armies as a useless encumbrance, had again risen into high favour. None of the Prussian cavalry wore their epaulettes on service except the Uhlans, but some officers of these regiments spoke most highly of the good service the little plates of shoulder armour had done in warding off sword cuts. The cuirass, too, proved more useful in close encounter than most people would have given it credit for, and was in more than one case the instrument of saving a man’s life, and yet the Prussian cuirasses are thin, ill made, and ill fitted in comparison with those of the British Household Cavalry. Still, there was a strong party against this defensive armour, for many in the army held that its use does not repay the extra weight it puts upon the horse, but this party was for the present silenced by the great success which the 5th regiment of Cuirassiers, attached to the crown prince’s army, had lately been in the combat near Tobitschau, where it took seventeen guns.
The needle-gun was of course an immense favourite, and the Prussian officers justly held that an army provided with a muzzle-loading arm can never hope to stand up to their troops in the shock of open battle; but their conclusion that the needle-gun is the best possible breech-loader was founded on nothing more than the fact that it is superior to a muzzle-loading rifle, and they advanced no good grounds for supposing that no breech-loader has been invented since the introduction of the needle-gun into the Prussian service, which can be superior to the arm that did such fearful execution in the Austrian ranks at Podoll, and in the actions before Gitschin.
The Prussians entered upon the campaign with their horse artillery armed with smooth-bore 12-pounder guns. They had long before the armistice bitterly repented this error, and will take care to remedy it before they are embroiled in another war. The whole of their field artillery is to be armed with steel breech-loading rifled guns constructed on Krupp’s system—good ordnance doubtless, but the Prussian guns did not appear in action to make such good practice as the Armstrong guns did in China, when the English gunners were still unaccustomed to them, and as yet looked upon all breech-loading ordnance with considerable suspicion. (In 1870-71, a portion of the Prussian field artillery was armed with bronze breech-loading guns, and probably in future all the guns for the field artillery will be made of bronze).
The Prussians on the 24th commenced massing troops towards the left of their position, with the view of being able to make an immediate dash on Preszburg on the afternoon of the 27th, if peace should not be concluded during the time that the armistice lasted; but most in camp looked upon this concentration as a needless precaution, for it was considered that peace was perfectly certain. But neither the staff nor the outposts were prevented by this feeling of certainty from using all precautions from being taken unawares; the railway still teemed with trains loaded heavily with troops and stores.
No news could be obtained of how the negotiations were going on at Nikolsburg, for the diplomatists preserved the correct diplomatic silence, and took care that the profanum vulgus should gain no clue either to the progress or probable result of the discussions held at their mysterious meetings.
Rumours, of course, were rife, and all of them prophesied peace; some went so far as to assert that the treaty would actually be signed on Thursday, the 26th; but how flax such reports were to be trusted could not be established, as popular opinion was now swayed about in the most extraor
dinary way. The sudden glance of a minister, or the wearied look of a plenipotentiary, was interpreted according to the inclination of the observer, and had some deep meaning attached to it, possibly very remote from what it might really signify.
Nothing was doing at headquarters, so a party of officers of the staff was made to visit the outposts, partly for the sake of something to do, partly in hopes of being able to catch some glimpses of the fortifications round Florisdorf, which are rapidly becoming famous. A ride of fifteen miles over the flat, wide-spreading Marchfeld, carpeted with meadows, clover-fields, and broad belts of stubble, from which most of the corn had been removed, past dark woods of fir and lighter copses of dark oak, took them to Wagram. More than once someone exclaimed, “What a beautiful battlefield for cavalry!” as they rode for miles over ground unbroken by fences or brooks, and in which the only obstacles to the free gallop of horses were a few small ditches, and here and there a tiny bank.
The village of Wagram, celebrated by the battle won here by the first Napoleon, contains a chapel where are collected many of the arms that were found on the field after that great fight. A strange feeling of awe comes upon one when brought face to face with these truest monuments of the great conflict waged here by the mighty dead; and the loud talk and laughter of careless soldiers fresh from a field of battle, and reckless of how soon they might march to another, were hushed, not more by the sanctity of the place than by an almost involuntary reverence for the visible memorials of the great battle and of the warriors who fell in it.
But disappointment has also its place in the mind; for how clumsy, how old-fashioned, according to our ideas, look those old flint muskets and heavy swords with which but a few years back the fate of Europe was decided! Could the question fail? Shall we to our successors in the next generation appear to have known so little of what science has in such a short time developed, and to have been so ignorant of mechanical appliances, which, when once unfolded, appear so simple and so palpable? And another thought came into every mind, which struck home to the heart; for it told that in a few short years those who had fought at Königgrätz and survived the long summer day’s slaughter on the Sadowa hill would individually be equally lost to memory as those who fell at Wagram—their names mostly unknown, their private deeds unrecorded by any historian.