Bohemia, and King William, who had General von Moltke, the greatest
soldier of his time, for his Chief of the Staff, or principal
counsellor in affairs of war, resolved to make a dash into this
province before its Austrian defenders knew where they were, and
smite them, as David did the Philistines, hip and thigh. Accordingly,
he divided the forces of his kingdom into three main armies, each
composed of several Army Corps. The command of the First, or centre,
Army, numbering about 93,000, was entrusted to the King’s nephew,
Prince Frederick Charles, called by his soldiers the “Red Prince,”
from the scarlet uniform of the Zieten Hussars which he generally
wore; the Second, or left-hand Army, totalling 100,000 men, was given
to the King’s high-souled and chivalrous son, the Crown Prince, Queen
Victoria’s son-in-law; while the Third, or right-hand host, called
of the Elbe, fell to General Herwarth von Bittenfeld, who fought
throughout the campaign with a courage worthy of “Hereward, the last
of the English.” But these three huge armies did not invade Bohemia in
one overwhelming mass. Moltke, the great “battle-thinker,” the “Silent
One in Seven Languages,” as his friends fondly called him, knew a trick
worth two of that. His maxim was, “march separately, strike combined”;
and yet it behoved him to keep the Austrians in perfect ignorance of
where he meant to strike. The Crown Prince, on the left, started with
his army from Silesia; the Red Prince set out from Lusatia, while
Herwarth’s point of departure was Thuringia.
Did Moltke himself also take the field? No, not at once; for it
meanwhile sufficed this great military chess-player, this mathematical
planner of victory, to sit quietly among his maps and papers at
the offices of the Grand General Staff in Berlin, with his hand on
the telegraph wire, and direct the movements of the three armies
of invasion. Take the following description that was penned by an
English witness of the crossing of the frontier by the army of the Red
Prince:--“It was here” (at a toll-house gate) “that Prince Frederick
Charles took his stand to watch his troops march over the border. He
had hardly arrived there before he gave the necessary orders, and in
a few moments the Uhlans, or Lancers, who formed the advance guard of
the regiments, were over the frontier. Then followed the infantry. As
the leading ranks of each battalion arrived at the first point on the
road from which they caught sight of the Austrian colours that showed
the frontier, they raised a cheer, which was quickly caught up by those
in the rear, and repeated again and again till, when the men came up
to the toll-house and saw their soldier-prince standing on the border
line, it swelled into a rapturous roar of delight, which only ceased to
be replaced by a martial song that was caught up by each battalion as
it poured into Bohemia. The chief himself stood calm and collected; but
he gazed proudly on the passing sections, and never did an army cross
an enemy’s frontier better equipped, better cared for, or with a higher
courage than that which marched out of Saxony that day.”
Over the picturesque hills of Saxony, over the Giant Mountains into the
fertile plains of Bohemia, swiftly sped the three superbly-organised
armies like huge and shining serpents; and ever nearer did they
converge on the point which, with mathematical accuracy, had been
selected as the place where they would have to coil and deliver their
fatal sting of fire. Hard did the Austrians try to block the path of
the triune hosts and crush them in detail; but the terribly destructive
needle-gun, with the forceful lance of the lunging Uhlan and the
circling sabre of the ponderous Cuirassier, ever cleared the way, and a
series of preliminary triumphs marked the progress of the three armies
towards junction and final victory. By the 29th the Red Prince had
reached Gitschin, the objective point of the invasion, while his cousin
the Crown Prince lay at Königinhof, on the left, a long day’s march
distant. Meanwhile the Austrians had all retired under the shelter of
the guns of Königgrätz, a strongly fortressed town on the left bank of
the Upper Elbe, there to take their final stand, with their backs, as
’twere, to the wall.
The Austrians were commanded by Feldzeugmeister Benedek, and their
army had been reinforced by the troops of the King of Saxony, who had
sided with the foes of Prussia in the impending conflict, and were sure
to give a good account of themselves. An equally stubborn resistance
was to be expected from the Hungarian subjects of the Emperor Francis
Joseph, who were second to none in all his polyglot dominions in
respect of that ancient valour and other chivalrous qualities which
had caused this gallant people to be called the “English of the
East.” Finer horsemen than the Hungarians existed in no army in all
the world; and in this campaign, as in every other in which they had
ever been engaged, the Austrians were particularly strong in cavalry.
But, on the other hand, the Prussians were known to be armed with the
lately-invented breech-loading needle-gun, while the Austrians still
clung to the older-fashioned muzzle-loader, and professed to make light
of their opponents’ new-fangled rifle. They were soon to be shown
convincingly which was the better weapon.
It was not till June 30th that King William and his paladins, Moltke,
Bismarck, and von Roon, left Berlin by rail for the seat of war. They
had scorned to witness the preliminary heats, so to speak, and only
wanted to be present at the grand final. On July 2nd, after reaching
Gitschin, which was near the headquarters of the Red Prince, Bismarck
wrote to his wife: “Just arrived from Sichrow. The field of battle
there is still covered with corpses, horses, and arms. Our victories
(so far) are greater than we thought. It appears that we have over
15,000 prisoners, while the loss on the Austrian side is still greater
in dead and wounded, being no less than 20,000. Two of the Army Corps
are utterly scattered, and some of the regiments are wiped out to the
last man. I have, indeed, up till now seen more Austrian prisoners than
Prussian soldiers.”
[Illustration: “MAJOR VON UNGAR CAME SPURRING IN WITH A
GREAT PIECE OF NEWS” (_p._ 77)]]
On the night of the same day (2nd July) King William, now in his
seventieth year, had retired to rest in a little room of the “Golden
Lion,” which overlooks the market-place of Gitschin--a quaint little
old town nestling among the hills of Northern Bohemia, on the southern
side of the Giant Mountains. Wearied out with the fatigues of the day,
he had hardly closed his eyes in sleep when he was unceremoniously
woke up. His Majesty opened his eyes, and found Moltke standing by his
bedside, the bearer of most important news, which General Voigts-Rhetz
had just brought in from the Red Prince, whose headquarters were
some six miles further to the east, at the château of Kamenitz on the
Königgrätz road. Voigts-Rhetz had first of all carried his momentous
news to Moltke, who lodged on the opposite side of the square, and who
was the real ruler of Prussia’s battles, now and after in the French
war. The King did nothing without consulting Moltke, nor did his
Majesty ever issue an order that was not based on the well-thought-out
advice of his Chief of the Staff.
The message of the Red Prince was of the very highest importance,
for it upset all the resolutions which had previously been taken at
the Prussian headquarters. Early in the day the exact whereabouts
of the Austrians was unknown. It was _supposed_ that they
were on the left, or eastern, side of the Elbe, furthest from the
Prussians, with their right and left flanks resting on two strong
fortresses--Josephstadt and Königgrätz, respectively--a position which
it would have been terribly difficult, if not impossible, for their
adversaries to assail; so that, pending the discovery of their real
whereabouts, it had been resolved to let the Prussian troops rest on
the 3rd, as they had been wearied out by their incredible feats of
marching and fighting. Presently, however, “from information received,”
this resolution was revoked and replaced by another which deprived the
fagged-out Prussians of the prospect of their much-needed day’s rest;
and a bold and rapid rider--Lieutenant von Norman--was despatched
across country to the Crown Prince at Königinhof to ensure his
co-operation with the Red Prince in a particular manner on the morrow.
[Illustration: KÖNIGGRÄTZ.]
But von Norman had barely started on his long and perilous ride when,
lo and behold! another officer, Major von Ungar, came spurring in to
the quarters of the Red Prince with a great piece of news. Attended
by only a few dragoons, this officer had gone out scouting in the
direction of Königgrätz, and discovered that the bulk of the Austrian
army was without doubt on the right, or Prussian, side of the Elbe,
holding a strong position on the further bank of the Bistritz brook,
which ran very nearly parallel with the Elbe at a distance from it
of some four miles. The position was strong, but not half so much so
as the dreaded one beyond the Elbe, and the hearts of the Prussians
jumped for joy. It seemed to them as if God had already delivered the
Austrians into their hands, as Cromwell avowed of the Scots when they
left their high ground at Dunbar and descended to meet his Ironsides
on the plain. After gleaning this priceless intelligence, von Norman
had to ride for his life. A squadron of Austrian cavalry made a dash to
catch him, but he rode like an English fox-hunter, and only left behind
him, as a souvenir of his audacious visit to the enemy’s lines, a part
of his tunic which had been carried away by an Austrian lance-thrust.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF KÖNIGGRÄTZ.]
This, then, was the news which Voigts-Rhetz had brought to Moltke and
the King at Gitschin, and then the situation underwent an immediate and
final change. It was resolved to assail the Austrian position early
on the morrow with the whole force of the united Prussian armies, and
another message to this effect, cancelling all previous ones, as a
codicil does a will, was at midnight despatched to the Crown Prince on
one hand and Herwarth on the other, informing them of the altered state
of things, and desiring them on the morrow to assail the flanks of
the Austrians as fast and furiously as ever they could; while the Red
Prince would apply his battering-rams to their elevated and strongly
entrenched centre. This urgent message was entrusted to Colonel von
Finckenstein, who, after a very dark and dangerous ride of twenty
miles, reached the Crown Prince’s quarters about four o’clock on the
morning of the 3rd July.
That fateful morning was a very wet and raw one, pretty similar to
that which, after a rainy night, had dawned upon the English at
Waterloo. Long before midnight the troops had all been in motion to
the front. The moon occasionally blinked out, but was mostly hidden
behind clouds, and then could be distinctly seen the decaying bivouac
fires in the places which had been occupied by the troops along the
road from Gitschin to Sadowa and Königgrätz. These fires looked like
large will-o’-the-wisps as their flames flickered about in the wind
and stretched for many a mile, for the bivouacs of so large a force as
that of the Red Prince’s army of nearly 100,000 men spread over a wide
extent of country. With the first signs of dawn a drizzling rain came
on, which lasted until late in the afternoon. The wind increased and
blew coldly upon the soldiers, and they were short of both sleep and
food, while frequent gusts bore down the water-laden corn on both sides
of the ground along the way.
Moltke and his staff had left Gitschin by four o’clock, driving to
Horitz, where, mounting their horses, they rode on to Dub and joined
Prince Frederick Charles. For this was the centre point of assembly.
“A few short words,” wrote the _Times_ correspondent, “passed
from the Commander of the First Army to his Chief of the Staff; a few
_aides-de-camp_, mounting silently, rode away; and, as it were,
by the utterance of a magician’s spell, one hundred thousand armed
Prussian warriors, springing into sight as if from the bowels of the
earth, swept over the southern edge of the Milowitz ravine towards the
hill of Dub.”
About eight o’clock, King William, with Bismarck and others of his
great men, arrived upon the scene. Behind the King, besides his staff,
were his royal guests, with their numerous retinues of adjutants and
equerries, grooms and horses, in number equal unto about a couple
of squadrons--making a fine mark for the shells of the Austrians.
Before mounting his good mare “Fenella”--thenceforth to be called
“Sadowa”--the King had got into his great-coat and put on goloshes
over his boots. A wrong pair of spurs had been brought from Gitschin
and would not fit. A groom whipped his off, and strapped them on over
the royal goloshes; and thus equipped, with a field-glass slung round
his neck by a long strap, the King rode away to view the course of the
terrific fight, being everywhere received with tremendous cheering by
his enthusiastic troops. For it touched their hearts to see so hoary a
king come forth at the head of his “_Volk in Waffen_” or people in
arms, to do strenuous battle with the alien. No _roi fainéant_,
or stay-at-home monarch he, but one of the good old sort, like our own
royal Edwards and Harries, under whose personal leadership the French
were “beaten, bobbed, and thumped” at Crécy and at Agincourt.
It had been thought incredible by the Prussian leaders that the
Austrians should have waived the advantages of a position behind the
Elbe, and come forward several miles on its hither bank so as to meet
their adversaries on the terms of the latter. But a closer inspection
of their line of battle showed that it had been singularly well chosen.
Along their front ran the boggy Bistritz brook, its banks dotted with
farmsteads, villages, and clumps of wood, forming fine cover for
infantry; while beyond this the ground rose in gentle undulations till
it finally assumed the appearance of a commanding swell or ridge,
from which Benedek’s batteries could pour down death and destruction
on the advancing Prussians over the heads of his own infantry when
engaging the helmeted wielders of the needle-gun. From the top of the
slight elevation whereon stands the village of Dub the ground slopes
gently down to the Bistritz, which the road crosses at the village of
Sadowa, a mile and a quarter from Dub. From Sadowa the ground again
rises beyond the Bistritz to the little village of Chlum (mark that
village!), conspicuous by its church-tower crowning the gentle hill, a
mile and a half beyond Sadowa--a beautiful bit of country not unlike
some parts of England with its hill and dale, clustering cottages,
peeping châteaux, hedgerows, groves, and waving grain-fields. Profiting
to the full by the defensive advantages of this terraced terrain, the
Austrians had seamed it with entrenched batteries, and palisaded their
approaches with felled trees and intertwisted branches, making of the
whole a natural fortress formidable to their assailants.
[Illustration: GENERAL BENEDEK.]
But nothing could daunt the hearts of the Prussians. They had got to
beat Benedek and his 220,000 men, and the sooner the better. The Red
Prince was afraid that, after all, Benedek might seek to retire behind
the Elbe, and this had to be prevented at all costs and hazards. The
Prince might not be able to beat him off-hand, but he could at least
fasten on Benedek like a bulldog and hold him fast there till the
arrival of the Crown Prince, when the bull could be altogether felled
and laid upon its back. Bang, therefore, went the Prussian batteries,
and presently the whole sinuous line of battle, extending about five
miles from Cistowes (opposite Chlum) on the Prussian left, to Nechanitz
on the right, began to be wrapped in wreathed cannon smoke. The
Austrians returned shot for shot, and neither side either gained or
lost ground. In the centre the Prussians pushed battery after battery
into action, and kept up a tremendous fire on the Austrian guns; but
these returned it with interest, knowing the ground well, and every
shell fell true, heaping the ground with dead and wounded men and
horses.
While this furious cannonade was going on, columns of Prussian
infantry were moved down towards the Bistritz, with intent to storm
the line of villages--Sadowa, Dohalitz, and Dohalicka--on the further
side. Shortly before their preparations were complete, the village
of Benatek, on the Austrian right, caught fire, and the 7th Prussian
Division made a dash to secure it; yet the Austrians were not driven
out by the flames, and here, for the first time in the battle, it
came to desperate hand-to-hand fighting. But the bloody _mêlée_
here was nothing to what was now mixing up the combatants in the wood
of Sadowa, and converting it into a perfect slaughter-house and hell
upon earth. Boldly the Prussians advanced upon this village and its
wood, plying the rapid needle-gun with awful effect upon the wood’s
defenders. But nothing could have exceeded the splendid courage with
which the Austrian battalions clung to their cover, and their volleys,
supplemented as they were by a truly infernal fire from the batteries
behind and above, seemed to mow down whole ranks of their assailants.
But neither bullets nor shells could decide the fierce struggle; the
bayonet had to be called in to do this. And now ensued most horrible
scenes of carnage, which ended, however, before eleven o’clock, in the
capture by the Prussians of the aforesaid villages. And no wonder that
the Austrians chose to call the tremendous battle after the village and
wood where they had made so glorious but ineffectual a stand.
[Illustration: “THE PRUSSIANS PUSHED BATTERY AFTER
BATTERY INTO ACTION” (_p._ 79)]
Moltke himself afterwards related that, while he was watching the
progress of events in front of Sadowa wood some roe-deer, startled from
their leafy glades by the infernal pother around them, came bounding
out and past him; and also how, when he and his suite rode forward a
little way along the Lissa road to reconnoitre the Austrian position,
he encountered an ownerless ox plodding along, serenely indifferent
to the shells that were bursting all around it. Opposite the Sadowa
wood on the Lissa heights, the Austrians had planted a most formidable
entrenched line of guns, and Moltke afterwards told how he succeeded in
getting the King to counter-order a command to storm these entrenched
batteries from the front, which could only have ended in the bloodiest
of disasters to their assailants.
About this time Bismarck, seeing how little headway the Prussians
were making, began to be rather apprehensive as to the general
result, fearing even that, if the Crown Prince came not up soon, they
might, after all, be beaten. But one little incident gave him fresh
hope. Taking out his cigar-case he offered a weed to Moltke, who
deliberately chose the best of the lot. “Oh,” thought Bismarck to
himself, “if Moltke is calm enough to do that, we need have no fear
after all.”
The coming of the Crown Prince, with his additional hundred thousand
men, had been as anxiously looked for as the arrival of Blücher on the
field of Waterloo, and in truth the two situations were closely alike.
Suddenly Bismarck, who had been looking intently in the Crown Prince’s
direction, lowered his glass and pointed to certain lines in the far
distance, but these the others pronounced to be furrows. “No,” said
Bismarck, looking again, “the spaces are not equal: they are advancing
lines.” And so they were; and by eleven o’clock the smoke of some
Austrian batteries furnished a convincing proof that their fire was
directed, not against the Red Prince’s, but “Unser Fritz’s” army; and
the words “The Crown Prince is coming!” passed from lip to lip. But,
some time before his advance had thus been signalised, Moltke made
answer to the King, who had been questioning him as to the prospects of
the fight, “To-day your Majesty will win, not only the battle, but also
the campaign.”
[Illustration: “BOLDLY THE PRUSSIANS ADVANCED UPON THIS
VILLAGE AND ITS WOOD” (_p._ 80).]
“The Prussian reserves,” wrote a correspondent with the Austrians,
“were once more called upon; and from half-past twelve till nearly
one o’clock there was an artillery fire from centre to left for six
miles or more, which could not well have been exceeded by any action
of which history makes mention. The battle was assuming a more awful
and tremendous aspect, and the faint rays of sunshine which shot at
intervals through the lifting clouds only gave the scene a greater
terror.” About this time, also, “Benedek and his staff passed through
the 6th Corps, which was in reserve. As the green plumes were seen
rapidly advancing, the bands broke forth into the National Anthem, and
the men cheered their commander with no uncertain note. Faces broke
into broad smiles; Jäger hats were thrown into the air; all seemed
joyous in the anticipation of an approaching triumph. Benedek, however,
waved to them to cease shouting, saying, in his peculiar tone of voice,
‘Not now, my children: wait till to-morrow.’” And it was wise advice;
for by this time Benedek had begun to suspect that he and his men would
soon all have a very different song to sing.
The storm and stress of battle were now beginning to tell heavily on
the Austrians. They were, it is true, still holding their own, or
something like it, on the line of the Bistritz; but what is that which
suddenly attracts the attention of Benedek and his staff behind the
village of Chlum? They gallop away thither to inquire into the cause
of all this new turmoil, and are greeted with a destructive volley
from the needle-guns of “Unser Fritz,” who had by this time, after
a forced march of frightful difficulty across the sodden country
from Königinhof, come upon the scene with his Guards, and not only
turned the flank, but positively fastened on the rear of the Austrian
fighting line, at which he was now hammering away with might and main.
But his path, so far, had been encumbered with corpses and mutilated
bodies in sickening masses. “Around us,” he wrote in his Diary, “lay
or hobbled about so many of the well-known figures of the Potsdam and
Berlin garrisons. A shocking appearance was presented by those who
were using their rifles as crutches, or were being led up the heights
by some other unwounded comrades. The most horrid spectacle, however,
was that of an Austrian battery, of which all the men and horses had
been shot down.... It is a shocking thing to ride over a battle-field,
and it is impossible to describe the hideous mutilations which present
themselves. War is really something frightful, and those who create it
with a stroke of the pen, sitting at a green-baize table, little dream
of what horrors they are conjuring up.... In Rosberitz, where the fight
must have been frightfully bitter, to judge from the masses of dead and
wounded, I found my kinsman, Prince Antony of Hohenzollern, who had
been shot in the leg by three balls,” and died of his wounds soon after.
With the turning of the Austrian right by the Crown Prince, the battle
was virtually won. On the extreme left, Herwarth had played similar
havoc with the Saxons, in spite of the heroic desperation with which
they fought; and by four o’clock the Prussian line of attack resembled
a huge semi-circle hemming in the masses of battered and broken
Austrian troops. Half an hour later the latter, perceiving that victory
had at last been snatched from their grasp, began to give way all along
their line; and then, with drums beating and colours flying, the Red
Prince’s men, with one accord, rose from their positions and began a
general advance. Perceiving his opportunity, the King now gallantly
placed himself at the head of the whole cavalry reserve of the First
Army, which “charged and completely overthrew,” to quote his Majesty’s
own words, a similar mass of Austrian horsemen.
The nature of the ground had hitherto prevented the cavalry of
either army from acting in masses, but the country was more open on
the line of retreat to Königgrätz, and it now became the scene of
several splendid lance and sabre conflicts. As the squadrons of the
3rd Prussian Dragoons were rushing forward to charge some Austrian
battalions near the village of Wiester, an Austrian Cuirassier brigade,
led by an Englishman of the name of Beales, charged them in flank.
They drove the Prussians back, and, smiting them heavily with their
ponderous swords, nearly destroyed the dragoons; but Hohenlohe’s
Prussian Uhlans, seeing their comrades worsted, charged with their
lances couched against the Austrian flanks, and compelled them to
retire. Pressed by the Lancers they fell back, fighting hard, but then
the scarlet Zieten Hussars charged them in turn in the rear. A fierce
combat ensued, and the gallant Beales himself was borne wounded to the
ground.