Although the American Civil War was studied by a number of European military observers,84 its special features (of distance, of the wilderness, of being a civil conflict) made it appear less of a pointer to general military developments than the armed struggles which were to occur in Europe during the 1860s. There the Crimean War had not only undermined the old-style Concert diplomacy but had also caused each of the “flank” powers to feel less committed to intervention in the center: Russia needed many years to recover from its humiliating defeat; and Britain preferred to concentrate upon imperial and domestic issues. This therefore left European affairs dominated, artificially as it turned out, by France. Prussia, having occupied a seemingly inglorious place under Frederick William IV during the Crimean War, was now convulsed by the constitutional quarrels between his successor William I and the Prussian parliament, especially over the issue of army reform. The Habsburg Empire, for its part, was still juggling with the interrelated problem of preserving its Italian interests against Piedmont and its German interests against Prussia, while at the same time endeavoring to contain Hungarian discontents at home.
France, by contrast, seemed strong and confident under Napoleon III. Banking, railway, and industrial development had all advanced since the early 1850s. Its colonial empire was extended in West Africa, Indochina, and the Pacific. Its fleet was expanded so that at times (e.g., 1859) it caused alarm on the other side of the English Channel. Militarily and diplomatically, it seemed to be the decisive third force in any solution of either the German or the Italian question—as was amply shown in 1859, when France swiftly intervened on Piedmont’s behalf in the short-lived war against Austria.85
Yet however important the battles of Magenta and Solferino were in compelling the Habsburg Empire to surrender its hold upon Lombardy, acute observers in 1859 would have noticed that it was Austrian military incompetence, not French military brilliance (and certainly not Piedmontese military brilliance!), which decided the outcome. France’s army did have the advantage of possessing many more rifles than Austria—this being responsible for the numerous casualties which so unnerved the Emperor Francis Joseph—but French deficiencies were also remarkable: medical and ammunition supplies were sorely lacking, mobilization schedules were haphazard, and Napoleon Ill’s own leadership was less than brilliant. This did not matter so much at the time, since the Habsburg army was weaker and the leadership of General Gyulai was even more dithering.86Military effectiveness is, after all, relative—which was later demonstrated by the fact that Habsburg forces could still deal easily with the Italians on land (at Custozza, in 1866) and at sea (at Lissa) even when they were incapable of taking on France, or Prussia, or Russia. But this meant, by extension, that France itself would not be automatically superior in a future conflict against a different foe. The outcome of that war would depend upon the varying levels of military leadership, weapons systems, and productive base possessed by each side.
Since it was precisely in the era of the 1850s and 1860s that the technological explosion caused by the Industrial Revolution made its first real impacts upon warfare, it is not surprising that armed services everywhere were now found grappling with unprecedented operational problems. What would be the more important arm in battle—the infantry with its new breech-loading rifles, or the artillery with its new steel-barreled, mobile guns? What was the impact of railways and telegraphs upon command in the field? Did the new technology of war give the advantage to the advancing army, or the defending one?87 The proper answer to such questions was, of course, that it all depends on the circumstances. That is, the outcome would be affected not only by newer weaponry but also by the terrain in which it was used, the morale and tactical competence of the troops, the efficacy of the supply systems, and all of the other myriad factors which help to decide the fate of battles. Since knowing beforehand how everything would work out was an impossibility, the key factor was the possession of a military-political leadership adept at juggling the various elements and a military instrument flexible enough to respond to new circumstances. And in these vital respects, neither the Habsburg Empire nor even France were going to be as successful as Prussia.
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.*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.88 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.89
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.90
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 byfrancs-tireurs could not conceal the fact that France had been smashed as an independent Great Power.91
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.”92 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.93
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,94 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.95 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.96What 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 worthiness97 was compromised in any future struggle against Berlin by the existence of a hostile and unpredictable Italy to the south.
With France isolated, Austria-Hungary cowed, and the intermediate “buffer states” of southern Germany and Italy now merged into their larger national units,98 the only substantial checks to the further aggrandizement of Germany seemed to lie with the independent “flank” powers of Russia and Great Britain. To British administrations oscillating between a Gladstonian emphasis upon internal reforms (1868–1874) and a Disraelian stress upon the country’s “imperial” and “Asian” destinies (1874–1880), this issue of the European equilibrium rarely seemed very pressing. This was probably not the case in Russia, where Chancellor Gorchakov and others resented the transformation of their Prussian client-state into a powerful Germany; but such feelings were mingled with the close dynastic and ideological sympathies that existed between the courts of St. Petersburg and Potsdam after 1871, by the still-pressing Russian need to recover from the Crimean War disasters, by the hope of obtaining Berlin’s support for Russian interests in the Balkans, and by the renewal of interest in central Asia. On the whole, however, the flank powers’ likelihood of intervening in the affairs of west-central Europe would depend heavily upon what Germany itself did; there was certainly no need to become involved if it could be assumed that the second German Reich was now a satiated power.99
This assurance Bismarck himself was all too willing to give after 1871, since he had no wish to create a gross-deutscher (“Greater German”) state which incorporated millions of Austrian Catholics, destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and left Germany isolated between a vengeful France and a suspicious Russia.100 It therefore seemed to him far safer to go along with the creation of the Three Emperors’ League (1873), a quasi-alliance which stressed the ideological solidarity of the eastern monarchies (as against “republican” France) and simultaneously cemented over some of the Austro-Russian clashes of interest in the Balkans. And when, during the “war-insight” crisis of 1875, indications arose that the German government might be contemplating a preventive war against France, the warnings from both London and (especially) St. Petersburg convinced Bismarck that there would be strong opposition to any further alterations in the European balance.101 For internal-political as well as external-diplomatic reasons, therefore, Germany remained within the boundaries established in 1871—a “half-hegemonial power,” as some historians have termed it—until its military-industrial growth and the political ambitions of a post-Bismarckian leadership would once again place it in a position to question the existing territorial order.102
However, to pursue that transformation would take us well into the next chapter. For the period of the 1870s and into the 1880s, Bismarck’s own diplomacy ensured the preservation of the status quo which he now deemed essential to German interests. The chancellor was partially helped in this endeavor by the flaring-up, in 1876, of another acute phase in the age-old “eastern question” when Turkey’s massacre of the Bulgarian Christians and Russia’s military response to it turned all attention from the Rhine to Constantinople and the Black Sea.103 It was true that the outbreak of hostilities on the lower Danube or the Dardanelles could be dangerous even to Germany, if the crisis was allowed to escalate into a full-scale Great Power war, as seemed quite possible by early 1878. However, Bismarck’s diplomatic skills in acting as “honest broker” to bring all the Powers to a compromise at the Congress of Berlin reinforced the pressures for a peaceful solution of the crisis and emphasized again the central—and stabilizing—position in European affairs which Germany now occupied.
But the great Eastern Crisis of 1876–1878 also did a great deal for Germany’s relative position. While the small Russian fleet in the Black Sea performed brilliantly against the Turks, the Russian army’s 1877 campaigning revealed that its post-Crimean War reforms had not really taken effect. Although bravery and sheer numbers produced an eventual Russian victory over the Turks in both the Bulgarian and the Caucasian theaters of operation, there were far too many examples of “extremely inadequate reconnaissance of the enemy positions, lack of coordination between the units, and confusion in the high command”;104 and the threat of British and Austrian intervention on Turkey’s behalf compelled the Russian government, once again aware of a looming bankruptcy, to agree to compromise on its demands by late 1877. If the Pan-Slavs in Russia were later to blame Bismarck for supervising the Berlin Conference which formalized those humiliating concessions, the fact remained that many among the St. Petersburg elite were more than ever aware of the need to maintain good relations with Berlin—and even to reenter, in a revised form, another Three Emperors’ understanding in 1881. Similarly, although Vienna had threatened to break away from Bismarck’s controls at the peak of the crisis in 1879, the secret Austro-German alliance of the following year tied it again to German strings, as did the later Three Emperors’ alliance of 1881, and the Triple Alliance between Berlin, Vienna, and Italy of 1882. All of these agreements, moreover, had the effect of drawing the signatories away from France and placing them in some degree of dependence upon Germany.105
Finally, the events of the late 1870s had reemphasized the longstanding Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Near East and Asia, which inclined both of those powers to look toward Berlin for benevolent neutrality, and turned public attention even further away from Alsace-Lorraine and central Europe. This tendency was to become even stronger in the 1880s, when a whole series of events—the French acquisition of Tunis (1881), the British intervention in Egypt (1882), the wholesale “scramble” for tropical Africa (1884 onward), and the renewed threat of an Anglo-Russian war over Afghanistan (1885)— marked the beginnings of the age of the “New Imperialism.”106 Although the longer-term effects of this renewed burst of western colonialism were going to profoundly alter the position of many of the Great Powers, the short-term consequence was to emphasize Germany’s diplomatic influence within Europe and thus aid Bismarck’s endeavors to preserve the status quo. If the peculiarly tortuous system of treaties and countertreaties which he devised during the 1880s was not likely to produce lasting stability, it nonetheless seemed to ensure that peace prevailed among the European powers at least in the near future.