Von Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, went home from the
Council-Extraordinary to his private quarters at the offices of the
Great General Staff. He dispatched the three-word telegram, and the
vast machine began to work....
All had been ready for two years. Nothing was left to finish at the
last moment. Not a speck of rust marred shaft or spindle or bearing,
not a drop of oil was clogged in any slot.
Days back, the Heads of Departments had been recalled by a brief
telegram from the Chief who knew how to be taciturn in seven
languages. Now, while in Berlin, as in every other city and town of
Prussia Proper and her Eleven Provinces, palaces, mansions,
restaurants and _cafés_, beer-gardens and schnaps-cellars blazed with
gas and resounded with the clinking of glasses, and people sat late
into the grilling July night discussing and rediscussing that special
supplement of the _North German Gazette_--which was being distributed
gratuitously by hundreds of thousands,--predicting the next move of
the Man of Iron, and the latest ruse of the Man of Paris,--consuming
tons of sausage, caviar, pickled salmon, herrings in salad, and
potted tunny, with strawberries and other fruits and sweet dishes,
all washed down by floods of cooling beer, or iced Moselle and
champagne--the numberless huge barracks and other military
establishments displayed another kind of activity.
Here no outbursts of patriotic song and festivity checked the rapid,
organized, methodical scurry of warlike preparation. Soldiers ran
about like busy ants, purposeful and unblundering. Long trains of
Army Service carts and wagons streamed in at divers lofty gates, to
emerge at others after the briefest interval, heavily laden with Army
stores, Army baggage, War material of all kinds. Night and day, huge
Government factories and foundries dithered and roared, filling up
newly made vacuums in those huge magazines and storehouses which must
always be kept full. In the gloomy dominions of the Iron King, Herr
Krupp, that stout-loined Teuton who begat great guns instead of tall
sons, and had them godfathered by Prussian Royalty--what forests of
tall chimneys belched forth smoke, canopying begrimed and prosperous
Westphalian towns, populated by innumerable swarthy toilers in the
gigantic iron and steel foundries! At Essen, where mountains of coal
kiss the sooty skies, and heavy locomotives ceaselessly grind over
networks of shining steel rails, dragging strings of trucks,
containing yet more fuel for the ever-hungry furnaces,--within an
impregnable rampart of solid masonry,--he dwelt in a Babylonian
palace. The panting of innumerable steam-power engines, the banging,
moaning, crashing, groaning, and grinding of forges, lathes, and
planing-machines; cutting, shaping, boring, and polishing machines;
with the beating of sixty-two steam-hammers, of all weights up to
that of fifty tons, which cost £100,000 to manufacture, sounded like
a cannon whenever it was used, and was kept working without pause, so
as not to lose a fraction of the interest of the capital sunk in
it--made his concert by day, and by night served for his serenade and
lullaby. He made laws for the control of his grimy subjects, this
Briareus of ten thousand hands--and enforced them by the aid of his
own police and magistrates. With orders in course of execution for
Turkey, China, Egypt, Russia, and Spain, he was yet able to deliver
eighty cannon per week to the different artillery depots of his
Fatherland. His steel, tempered by his secret process, the new ore
being brought him from his Spanish mines by his own fleet of
transports, surpassed even Bessemer's. Yet he was not a conceited or
purse-proud man. By the chief entrance of the biggest of all his
factories stood the little soot-blackened forge where forty years
before young Krupp had labored with his father and a couple of
workmen. Small wonder the powerful Iron King had honor from his
over-lord.
Conceive next the well-ordered bustle at the headquarters of the
different Army Corps, when the withered finger of the Warlock pressed
upon the button, and the spark of electricity leaped along a thousand
wires, carrying with it the vitalizing word.... Moltke's methods
were then fire-new, and made the world sit up.
You might have seen the Reserve men of the Twelve Provinces--whose
summons for assembly lay ready in the Landwehr office of every city,
town, village, or hamlet--streaming in at the district depots,
bringing each Line regiment up to war-strength (nearly double its
numbers in time of peace). Mobilization was no foreign word to them,
for once a year, after Schmidt, the field-laborer, had done getting
in the harvest, and when Schultz, the bank-clerk, and Kunz, the
chemist's assistant, had got their annual autumn holiday, Schmidt,
Schultz, and Kunz were accustomed to perform a series of carefully
rehearsed physical exercises ending in maneuvers, and a safe if
inglorious return to the domestic hearth.
Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz were only remarkable by their unlikeness
to each other--Schmidt being the brown, uncouth, and unshaven husband
of a stout wife and numerous tow-headed babes. Schultz was more
recently married to a young lady remotely connected on the maternal
side with a family possessing the right to inscribe the aristocratic
prefix "von" before its surname. The couple lived frugally on Herr
Schultz's salary of thirty pounds a year, somewhere upon the
outskirts of the select quarter of the country town (some four miles
distant from Schmidt's native village)--while Kunz, the graduate of a
University, and author of a text-book of Analytical Chemistry, sold
impartially to both, squills, rhubarb-tincture, and porous plasters
over the counter of his employer's shop.
Served by the Burgomaster's clerk, or a wooden-faced
orderly-corporal, with the compelling bit of paper, Schmidt, Schultz,
and Kunz, having taken farewell embraces of their nearest and
dearest, would sling over their shoulders canvas wallets containing a
lump of sausage, a shirt or so, a huge chunk of bread, white or
black, with a bottle containing wine or schnaps, and stowing next
their skins leather purses containing a few coins, and a parchment
volume resembling the English soldier's "small book," would hasten by
rail or road in the direction of their regimental rendezvous, toward
which bourne the Reserve contingent of other towns, villages, and
hamlets would also betake themselves, until the roads were blackened
with their tramping bodies and the trains would be packed chock-full.
Arrived at Headquarters, batch after batch,--subsequently to a brief
but exhaustive medical overhauling--would be dispatched to the
arsenal, where attaching themselves to a tremendous queue of other
Schmidts, Schultzes, and Kunzes, they would mark time in double-file
outside a vast, grim, barn-like structure, until the moment arrived
for entering; when with well-accustomed quickness, each would find
his way to a certain hook or group of hooks, surmounted with his
regimental number, from which depended a certain familiar uniform,
with accoutrements and weapons equally well known.
Picture innumerable alleys formed by these dangling uniforms,
radiating away to the point of distance,--and suppose Schmidt,
Schultz, and Kunz equipped in something answering to the twinkling of
a Teutonic eye.
In--supposing Schmidt, Schultz, or Kunz to belong to the Infantry--a
pair of dark gray unmentionables, red-corded down the side-seams, and
a pair of mid-leg-high boots, very roomy and strong. Inside the
boots were no stockings, tallowed linen bands being bound about the
legs and feet. A single-breasted tunic of dark blue cloth with red
facings followed, and a flat forage-cap of blue cloth with a red
band, or a glazed black leather helmet with a brazen Prussian eagle
front-plate and a brass spike-top. With the addition of a zinc
label, slung round the neck, and bearing a man's name, number,
company, and regiment, an overcoat made into a sausage and tied
together at the ends, a canvas haversack, glass leather-covered
canteen, a pipeclayed waistbelt with two cartridge-boxes of black
leather, and a knapsack of calf-skin tanned with the hair, stretched
upon a wooden frame, and slung by two pipe-clayed straps hooked to
the waistbelt in front and then passing over the shoulders. Two
shorter straps, going under the armpits, would be fastened to the
knapsack, which had a receptacle for a packet of twenty cartridges at
either end of it. Within, suppose the usual soldier's kit, with
spoon, knife, fork, comb, and shaving-glass; and on top imagine a
galvanized iron pot, holding about three quarts, with a tight-fitting
cover which became, at need, a frying-pan. Arm with a strong
waistbelt-sword about fifteen inches long, an unburnished needle-gun
heavily grease-coated, and Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz, having hung
their civilian garments on the hooks that erst supported the martial
panoply, tugged at a final buckle-strap, wheeled and passed out,
transformed, by yet another door.
Always the three had known that an hour would come when these
familiar exercises would not end with half-a-dozen exceedingly
strenuous field-days, and a return,--on the part of Schmidt and
Schultz,--to the arms of their respective wives. Schmidt, on whose
breast shone the war-medal of '66, and who must now be addressed as
"Herr Sergeant" by his social superiors, seemed not to mind at all,
though he swore at his boots, quite unjustly, for pinching. But the
bank-clerk's espousals were too recent, and his first experience of
paternity too near at hand, for any display of hardihood, while Herr
Kunz was but newly betrothed to the apothecary's daughter Mina, and
could not forget how the tears had rolled out of her large blue eyes
at the prospect of parting with her beloved Carl.
Therefore, although the mouths of the trio were, when not
professionally shut, busily engaged in bellowing "_Die Wacht am
Rhein_," "_Ich bin ein Preusse_," and other patriotic songs, or
sending up deafening "Hochs" for the King, the Crown Prince, Prince
Friedrich Karl, "Our Moltke," and another public personage recently
very much elevated in the popular esteem,--the mental visions of at
least two of them were occupied with prophetic visions in which
blue-eyed sweethearts pined and faded away out of grief for absent
betrotheds, and young wives wept over empty cradles until they too
expired, with faltering messages of love for the husband so far
distant on their dying lips....
"_Sapperlot_! What in thunder are you gaping at, you _gimpel_, you?"
a rough, loud voice would shout, and a terrific thump from the hard
and heavy hand of Sergeant Schmidt would visit the shoulders of
Private Schultz, or Kunz. Who thus addressed would jerk out:
"Oh, nothing, nothing, Herr Sergeant, truly nothing at all!" and
receive from their recently despised inferior the rude counsel to
look alive and keep cheery:
"For this will be a war worth fighting in, mark you! The Man on the
Seine has played the part of the Evil Neighbor too long. France and
Prussia have got to come to clapperclaws--there's no help for it!
The soup is cooked, so let us eat it. He is the luckiest who gets
the spoon in first!"
You may suppose precisely similar scenes and dialogues occurring in
the experience of Kraus, Klaus, and Klein, who, having served their
time with the active Army and passed from the Reserve into the
_Landwehr_, were now fetched out with the First Call, not only to
replace the garrisons of Saxony, Prague, Pardubitz, and all the other
fortified points on the lines of communication, but to guard and
patrol those lines of road and railway over which the three marching
armies were to receive supplies of food, ammunition, clothing,
stores, and medicine; and maintain telegraphic communication with
Berlin. Meanwhile Grein, Schwartz, and Braun, men of riper years,
stiffer joints, and older experiences, remained at home; waiting the
hour when, Death having thinned the ranks of the fighters in the
forefront of the battle, the Second Call should sound. When these
hardy veteran battalions, formed into divisions of the same numerical
strength as those of the regular Army, would roll over the frontiers,
to fill up the bloody gaps left by the scythe of the Red Mower, and
play their part in the vast, chaotic, multi-tableauxed drama of War.
Prussia contributed some 652,294 actors of small parts to the said
drama, not counting the leading men, stars of the war-theater, who
supported the heavier roles. And Bavaria, Würtemburg, and Baden
contributed their contingents, bringing up the strength of the cast
to 780,923 performers. The equine actors numbered 213,159.
The vast machine worked wonderfully. It is interesting to know that
the German Staff maps of France showed recently made roads which in
July, 1870, had not been marked upon any map issued by the Imperial
War Office at Paris, and that within three days from that three-word
signal-wire of Moltke's, military trains full of men, guns, horses,
ammunition, and proviant, began to run at the rate of forty per day,
from north, east, and south, toward the narrow frontier between
Strasbourg and Luxembourg.
"For God and Fatherland!" and "Watch well the Rhine!" said the
miniature banners carried by thousands of people. You could see them
fluttering from crowded roofs and packed windows, and variegating the
sidewalks of thoroughfares below, as regiment after regiment marched
to the station, in shining rivers of _pickelhaubes_ and bayonets, or
Dragoon helmets, Hussar busbies, and Uhlan schapkas, flowing between
upheaped banks of waving women and cheering men.
Speedily, in response to communications addressed by the Crown Prince
to the South German sovereigns, notifying these potentates of his
appointment as Commander-in-Chief of their armies, came replies
expressing satisfaction of different shades and qualities. The Grand
Duke of Baden's bubbled with joy, and expressed the determination of
his troops to gain their Royal Commander's confidence by fidelity and
bravery. The King of Würtemburg rejoiced likewise, but in cooler
terms, "in our German affair" being brought to a head at last; and
was anxious to have the opportunity of saluting the heir of Prussia.
The King of Bavaria telegraphed "_Very happy. Many thanks your Royal
Highness's attention!_" A message which conveyed no more warmth than
was felt.
His telegram of martial support, addressed at the outset of affairs
to Onkel Wilhelm, had seemed quite genuine. Had not Count Bismarck
quite a sheaf of documents, more or less compelling, signed in the
youthful monarch's scrawling hand? King Ludwig had ordered immediate
mobilization of the dark green and light blue uniforms--expended
millions of gulden in variegated lamps, public fountains of white
beer and red wine, bands, Royal Command Opera performances, patriotic
set-pieces in fireworks (representing the tutelary genii of Prussia
and Bavaria, cuirassed and armed, upholding the standards of
black-and-white and blue-and-white), joined in the "_Wacht am Rhein_"
as though he liked the tune (which he abhorred), and certainly
enjoyed the tumultuous plaudits with which his subjects greeted their
monarch's first and last appearance in the character of a man of
action.
But instead of riding away at the head of the South German Army,
Nephew Ludwig sent an excuse to Onkel Wilhelm--one has heard a
gumboil named as occasion of the disability--and Cousin Fritz was
dispatched to take over chief command.
Prince Luitpold of Bavaria accompanied the First Army Headquarter
Staff. Alas, the appointment but served to inflame the gumboil of
the jealous King,--the accounts that were daily to reach him of the
prowess of his martial cousin of Prussia worked like poison in his
blood. He drew the hood of his mantle of dreams more closely over
his head to shut out those fanfares of triumph, those "Hochs!" and
cheerings, and plunged more deeply into the solitudes of his forests
and mountain-caves. Blood and iron were his bugbears, and yet they
might have been his tonics too. They might have staved off the black
hound of Destiny, already baying at his heels, and saved him from
vicious decadence, ultimate madness, and a strange and sordid end.
And yet, how did his chivalrous cousin die, at the meridian of robust
manhood, under the newly imposed weight of an Imperial Crown? Not
the swift, soldierly death that is given by the bullet of a
chassepot--the projectile from a mitrailleuse--the flying fragment of
an exploding shrapnel-shell--but a straw-death, a bed-death such as
angry seers and cursing Valkyrs of Scandinavian legend foretold as
the speedy punishment of warriors who had broken faith and tarnished
by false oaths the brightness of their honor.
But no shadow of the grim fate that was to befall him darkened those
brave blue eyes at this period. Laboring night and day at the
mobilization of his Third Army, in concert with his Chief of Staff,
Von Blumenthal, he was buoyantly happy, despite his hatred of the
shedding of blood and his undisguised compassion for the conjectured
plight of the Man on the Seine.
With whom Britannia at first expressed a sympathy not at all
restrained or guarded, and for the success of whose arms she was
openly eager, until, toward the close of this momentous month of
July, 1870, the text of a brief but pithy diplomatic document, penned
in precise and elegant French, and dated a few years previously--made
its appearance in the columns of the Times.
The movements of the opposing forces camped on the banks of the Meuse
and the Saar lost interest for the public eye in perusal of this
rough memorandum of a proposed treaty between the Third Napoleon and
the King of Prussia, scrawled in Count Benedetti's flowing Italian
hand.
Since the spring of '67 it had been hidden away in a snug corner of
Bismarck's dispatch-box, waiting to jump out. You recall the terms
of the thing--one of many overt attempts to seize a coveted prize.
The Empire of France was to recognize the acquisitions made by
Prussia in the war of 1866 with Austria. Prussia was to aid Napoleon
III. to buy from Holland the debatable Duchy of Luxembourg. The
Emperor was to shed the luster of his smile and the _ægis_ of his
approval upon Federal Union between the North German Parliament and
the South German States--the separate sovereignty of each State
remaining. In return, Prussia was to abet the Bonaparte in the
military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kingdom of
Belgium. And in furtherance of these laudable ends, an alliance,
offensive and defensive, against any Power, insular or otherwise, was
to be compact between the great gilt eagle of the Third Empire and
the black-plumaged bird across the frontier.
Britons, with inconveniently good memories, perusing this draft,
recalled the existence of a treaty existing between France, England,
and Prussia, mutually binding these Powers to protect the neutrality
of Belgium, and drew reflections damaging to the betrayer and the
betrayed. French diplomatists asserted that the project had been
drawn up by Benedetti at Bismarck's dictation. Why preserve so
explosive a document, they argued, if it was never to be drawn out
and supplied with detonators in the shape of signatures? Later on M.
Rouher's boxes of official papers, found at his château of Cercay,
gave up the original draft-treaty annotated in the Emperor's
handwriting.
For it was his nature, may God pardon him! to be false and specious,
ungrateful and an oath-breaker. He must always repay great services
with great wrongs. Thus in the red year 1870, England, who in '54
had poured out blood and treasure lavishly to aid him, receiving this
plain proof of treachery, stood sorrowfully back and saw him rush
upon his fate. Sick and desperate, madly hurling his magnificent
Army hither and thither upon the arena, a Generalissimo out-generaled
before the War was a week old.
He had made France his mistress and his slave, and now her fetters
were to be hacked apart by the merciless sword of the invader.
Through losses, privations, and humiliations; through an ordeal of
suffering unparalleled in the world's history; through an orgy of
vice and an era of infidelity; through fresh oceans of blood shed
from the veins of her bravest; she was to pass before she found
herself and GOD again.
Meanwhile, North, East, South and West, prevailed a great swarming
scurry of military preparation, the tunes of the "_Wacht am Rhein_"
and "_Heil dir im Siegeskranz_" clashing with "_Partant pour la
Syrie_" and the "_Marseillaise_"; and the solemn strains of masses
rising up together with Lutheran litanies, as two great nations
strove to convince Divine Omnipotence that Codlin deserved to whip,
and not Short.
Strange! that Christian men, who frankly confess themselves to be
sinners, worms, and dust-grains before the supreme Majesty of the
Creator, should be so prone to offer Him advice.