Königgrätz: The Seven Weeks That Gave Birth to Germany

Bölüm metni

An Austrian soldier had to rise to his feet to load his rifle; the Prussian facing him, lying flat on the ground, fired five rounds in the same span of time. That morning the fate of two empires rested on which end of the barrel a gun was loaded from. And by evening a new giant had been born in the middle of Europe.

In February of eighteen sixty-six, in the headquarters at Verona in northern Italy, a sixty-one-year-old commander sat looking for a way to turn down the greatest promotion of his life. His name was Ludwig von Benedek, and he was the most beloved soldier in the Austrian Empire. Vienna was offering him command of the Northern Army, to be assembled in Bohemia — command, in other words, of everything the empire possessed. Benedek refused three times. His reason was not an excuse but a cold diagnosis: he knew neither that terrain nor that enemy.

To understand the weight of those words, you have to look at where the man came from. Benedek was born on the fourteenth of July, eighteen oh four, in the town of Sopron in western Hungary, the son of a provincial physician. He was Protestant, of Hungarian descent, and within an officer class defined by commanders who carried the title of count, he remained an outsider all his life. He owed his rise not to family connections but to his courage, and to the strange, almost familial devotion his soldiers felt for him. Among the rank and file he was a legend: a commander who spoke plainly, who stood beside his men in the trenches, who despised paperwork.

And that entire life had been spent in a single geography: Italy. He knew every ditch of the Lombard plain, every crossing of the river Mincio, every hill around Verona. On the twenty-fourth of June, eighteen fifty-nine, at Solferino, as the imperial army's center dissolved before the French, Benedek held the right wing on the ridges of San Martino against the Piedmontese all day long. The battle was lost, but on his own front he was not beaten. He returned to Vienna as "the Lion of Solferino" — the one bright name to emerge from a catastrophic decade for the empire.

And that was precisely the problem. What Austria needed in eighteen sixty-six was not a symbol but a mind that knew the north. Friction with Prussia had been escalating for months. Two years earlier the two states had fought shoulder to shoulder against Denmark, taking the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein together, and had then failed to agree on how to divide the spoils. In Berlin there was a minister-president named Otto von Bismarck, and he was saying openly that a two-headed arrangement in the German world could not be sustained. Vienna's real fear was a war on two fronts: in the south the Kingdom of Italy wanted Venetia; in the north Prussia could march into Bohemia.

The logic at the decision table ran like this: put your best commander where the danger is greatest. And so Benedek was taken out of Italy and sent to a country where he had never once campaigned. Emperor Franz Joseph insisted; the commander who had written refusal after refusal finally bowed. He delayed his departure for weeks, but reached Vienna on the twelfth of May, eighteen sixty-six. Archduke Albrecht, sent to the Italian front in his place, would win a brilliant victory there two months later at Custoza — which is to say Austria had placed both of its commanders on the wrong front.

It is said that when Benedek arrived at his headquarters, he shut himself in with maps of Bohemia, trying until past midnight to memorize the names of villages he did not know. On paper the army in his hands was enormous: seven corps, a powerful mass of cavalry, and the finest artillery in Europe. But this army had no staff tradition. The corps commanders were archdukes and counts, unaccustomed to taking orders, and they did not speak to one another. Benedek's own chief of staff, Gideon von Krismanić, was a man who never fully explained the war plan to his commander, who carried that plan around like a secret. So the empire had sent a commander into terrain he did not know — and made his own staff a stranger to him as well.

In mid-June the war began. In the assembly of the German Confederation, mobilization against Prussia was put to a vote on Austria's motion; Prussia declared the confederation dissolved and on the fifteenth and sixteenth of June marched into the neighboring German states. What followed was that short, sharp conflict that would go down in history as the Seven Weeks' War — the one that redrew Europe.

As Benedek dragged his army from Moravia toward Bohemia, he was aware that he was walking into a sentence he had written himself. The heaviest thing that can happen to a commander is not defeat; it is having said in advance, in writing, that he would lose — and being sent anyway.

On the other side, in Berlin, there was a sixty-five-year-old man: frail, silent, very nearly invisible. Helmuth von Moltke had been chief of the Prussian General Staff since eighteen fifty-seven, and to that day he had never commanded an army in war. The place where he had proven his military gift was not the battlefield but the desk.

Moltke's achievement was to change the very technology with which the art of war was practised. In the middle of the nineteenth century two new instruments had appeared: the railway and the telegraph. The railway could carry an army to the frontier in a matter of days instead of marching it for weeks. The telegraph made it possible to issue orders from hundreds of kilometres away. Moltke fused these two instruments with an institution: the general staff. Officers who had passed through the same training, who spoke the same language and thought in the same way, were distributed among armies far apart from one another, so that the commander at the top did not have to spell out every detail — they all worked towards the same objective.

The figures lay the difference bare. Prussia had five railway lines reaching towards the theatre of war; Austria had one. Prussia completed its mobilisation within weeks, while Austrian troops were still swallowing dust in marching columns. And then there was the rifle. Prussian infantry carried the breech-loading Dreyse needle gun: a soldier could lie flat on the ground, behind cover, and fire four or five rounds a minute. Austrian infantry, with the muzzle-loading Lorenz rifle, had to stand upright and tip the barrel skyward, and could barely manage two. Austria had misread the lesson it learned from the French in eighteen fifty-nine, and had adopted a doctrine resting not on firepower but on the bayonet charge. That meant attacking in close order, at a run, trying to close chest to chest. Against that, Austrian artillery was better than Prussia's; the rifled Austrian guns shot further and more accurately. The war would come down to the question of on what ground these two advantages would meet.

Moltke divided his army into three. On the left wing, Herwarth von Bittenfeld's Army of the Elbe, roughly thirty-nine thousand strong; in the centre, Prince Friedrich Karl's First Army of eighty-five thousand; and far off on the right, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm's Second Army of one hundred thousand. The three armies were strung out along an arc of some four hundred kilometres. To the classical military mind this was suicide: the enemy could push into the gaps and crush the armies one by one. Moltke's principle was precisely the opposite, and it fitted into a single sentence: march divided, strike together. Marching divided meant speed and supply; striking together meant catching the enemy from the front and the flank at the same moment.

The price of this principle was timing, and the price of timing was communication. At the end of June there was a series of clashes along the frontier. On the twenty-seventh of June, at Trautenau, Ludwig von Gablenz's Austrian corps threw the Prussians back; it was the only Austrian victory of the entire campaign, and Austria paid for it with several times the Prussian casualties. In those same days, at Nachod, at Skalitz, at Gitschin, the needle gun showed what it could do. Austrian divisions ran up the slopes in dense columns and melted away in front of Prussians firing from the prone.

On the first of July, Benedek sent his emperor a telegram. He wrote that the army was being dragged towards catastrophe and begged that peace be made at any price. Franz Joseph's reply was short: peace was impossible; if a withdrawal could not be avoided, it must be carried out in good order. And he added a question — has a battle been fought? Benedek now had no choice but to fight.

He placed his army on the hills north-west of Königgrätz, the fortress town on the bank of the Elbe. These high ridges put his guns in a commanding position, but behind them lay a river; if he were beaten, the army would be funnelled into a single narrow bottleneck. The battle would be given two names. The Prussians used the name of the fortress at their enemy's back; the Austrians and the French used the name of the small village in the middle of the front — Sadowa.

On the night of the second of July, a cavalry patrol reported to Prussian headquarters that the Austrian army had not fled, that it was standing on the hills. When Moltke heard this, he knew the opportunity he had been waiting for had come: the First Army would hold the enemy from the front, while the Crown Prince's Second Army came down on the flank from the north. There was only one problem. The Crown Prince was forty kilometres away, and the telegraph line to him was not working that night. The order went on horseback. Among the aides who set out at midnight, Lieutenant Colonel Count Finckenstein crossed that distance at a gallop, through rain, through mud, through darkness, and delivered the order at four in the morning.

The fate of the whole campaign hung, for a few hours, on the speed of a single rider.

The morning of the third of July, eighteen sixty-six, opened with rain and a low mist. The fields were knee-deep in mud, the wheat was beaten flat, the streambeds were in flood.

Towards eight o'clock the Prussian First Army came down to the Bistritz, the stream running through the middle of the front, and began to cross by the bridges around the village of Sadowa. Facing them, on the Lipa heights two or three kilometres beyond, hundreds of Austrian gun barrels were waiting. The moment the Prussians crossed the stream those guns began to speak, and they did not fall silent all morning. The Prussian centre was pinned on the open slope, under a fire its own guns could not reach.

The real slaughter, though, took place on the right, in the woods at the northern end of the line. It was called the Swiepwald — the Swiep forest, for short. A few kilometers long, thick with old trees, a wood in which no one could see more than about twenty meters in any direction. The Prussian Seventh Division followed its commander, Eduard von Fransecky, into that forest, and never came out again.

Benedek's order had been clear: the corps on the right wing were to hold their positions and keep the Horenowes heights against the Second Army, which might come down from the north. But the sound of rifle fire drifting out of the woods, and the sheer smallness of the Prussian division visible outside them, drew two corps commanders into an irresistible temptation. First Count Festetics's Fourth Corps, then Count Thun's Second Corps threw themselves forward against orders and plunged in among those trees. Two entire corps were spent to crush a single division, and the right wing was left empty.

The forest stripped Austria of every advantage it had. The artillery could not fire; there was no room for a bayonet charge in close order. The only thing possible was to shoot between the tree trunks at fifteen paces, and that was precisely the range at which the needle gun was the finest weapon in the world. Austrian battalions advanced again and again, and again and again were thrown back. A counterattack led by Colonel Carl von Pöckh drove the Prussians back for a moment; then fire from a Prussian division coming in on the flank all but annihilated that battalion, and Pöckh was killed in the fighting. A fragment of a cannon shell tore off Count Festetics's foot; Anton von Mollinary, who took his place, went on pressing into the woods.

Fransecky's division stayed in there for five hours. It had gone in with nine thousand men and lost close to two thousand. But it held. The other side paid far more dearly: by some accounts those two Austrian corps lost nearly ten thousand men over a single copse.

Toward midday the Prussian headquarters, on the low rise called the Roskosberg, came face to face with an unpleasant truth. King Wilhelm the First was there, Moltke was there, and Bismarck was there too, moving about not in civilian dress but in the uniform of a reserve officer. The center could not advance, the right wing was bleeding inside a forest, and there was still no word from the Crown Prince. Shells were falling so close that Bismarck is said to have seized the king's bridle to pull him back out of the line of fire.

A detail Bismarck later recounted conveys the tension of those hours better than any commander's report. He held out his cigar case to Moltke. Inside were one good cigar and a few ordinary ones. Moltke leaned over the case, looked without hurrying, picked out the best one and took it. In that instant Bismarck was reassured: if the man was still calm enough to make a choice, things could not be all that bad.

And indeed they were not. The price the Prussian center had been paying all morning was, in fact, Moltke's plan working. Benedek's entire attention and all his reserves had been drawn to the front and to that forest. The door facing north stood wide open.

Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm had been on the march since six o'clock that morning. He was thirty-four years old, a crown prince known for his liberal leanings, inwardly opposed to the policy his father was pursuing with Bismarck; on that day none of it mattered in the slightest. He had one hundred thousand men in hand, and kilometers of road that had to be pushed through the mud.

Around half past two in the afternoon the vanguard of the Second Army appeared on the heights to the north. The Austrian right wing they should have found in front of them was not there; that wing had been fighting in the Swiep forest since morning. The Prussians climbed an utterly empty ridge line, and when they reached the crest they saw, spread out below them, the rear of the Austrian army.

The key to the whole position was Chlum — the village and hill known as Hlum. It lay right beside Benedek's headquarters, it commanded the entire front, and at that hour it was undefended. The Prussian First Guard Division, under the command of Wilhelm Hiller von Gaertringen, came up the slope without meeting any resistance at all and took the hill around three o'clock. The Austrian batteries were struck while still trying to work out what had happened, as the first volleys came from behind their own lines.

When Benedek was told that Hlum had fallen, he did not believe it. He rode forward to see it with his own eyes, and saw the Prussian Guards up on the hill. At that moment the battle was over; the only question left was whether the army could be saved.

In that last hour the Austrian army showed what it had failed to show all day. Wilhelm von Ramming's Sixth Corps made a desperate counterattack toward the village behind Hlum; for a while they came within reach of retaking the hill. Hiller von Gaertringen, the commander of the Prussian Guards, died of a wound he received in that fighting. But the flow of arriving Prussian troops could not be stopped.

At three o'clock Benedek gave the order to withdraw, and to make that order possible he sacrificed the two finest arms of his army. The Austrian reserve artillery stayed where it stood in the open ground, battery by battery, and went on firing; they did not pull back until the guns fell silent. Then the Austrian and Saxon cavalry charged the advancing Prussian lines one wave after another. In those final charges close to two thousand horsemen and horses were lost. What was bought in return was a few hours — and those few hours kept the Army of the North from being destroyed altogether.

The retreat turned into a nightmare all the same. The army poured back toward the single way out behind it, toward the crossings over the river Elbe and the fortress of Königgrätz. The fortress commander, afraid that the Prussians might slip inside, kept the gates shut, and he had flooded the surrounding countryside for the sake of the defence. Thousands of soldiers, gun carriages and horses became entangled on a bank turned to swamp and at the narrow bridgeheads.

By evening the figures spoke for themselves. On the Prussian side there were around nine thousand dead, wounded and missing. Austria and her ally Saxony had lost close to forty-four thousand men; roughly twenty thousand of them were prisoners. One hundred and eighty-seven guns and dozens of colours had been left in enemy hands. In a single day, in a single afternoon, one of the oldest dynastic armies in Europe had lost a third of its fighting strength.

That evening Benedek sent his emperor a second telegram: the catastrophe he had warned of two days earlier had come to pass that day.

At Prussian headquarters, a very different sentence was being spoken. When the Crown Prince's colours appeared on the ridge to the north, Moltke is said to have turned to the king and told him that his majesty had won not merely a battle but the entire campaign. That same day in Berlin, voting was under way for the Prussian House of Representatives. The liberals who had resisted Bismarck through all the years he governed without a budget fell back seriously for the first time in that election. He had won on the battlefield and at the ballot box on the same day.

In the days after the victory was won, the real quarrel began inside Prussia's own headquarters, and the outcome of that quarrel determined more than the war itself did.

The army was advancing toward Vienna. For King Wilhelm the First and most of his commanders the matter was self-evident: they would enter the enemy capital, hold a parade, take territory from Austria, and punish the German states that had sided with the Habsburgs. The bill for centuries of Prussian-Austrian rivalry would finally be presented.

Bismarck stood against it alone, and found himself in a strange position: the man accused of starting the war was now trying to stop it. His argument was not sentimental but cold. Prussia's aim was not to destroy Austria but to push her out of the German world. Since that work was done, the Austria of tomorrow ought to be a partner rather than an enemy; a state that has been humiliated looks for revenge at the first opportunity. What is more, the clock was running. In France, Napoleon the Third had stepped onto the stage with an offer of mediation, and he was not pleased to see Prussia growing so large; within the Prussian army, meanwhile, it was said that cholera was carrying off more men than the fighting. If peace were not signed within a week, the victory already won could turn into a European crisis.

The dispute came to a head in the Moravian town of Nikolsburg. In his own memoirs Bismarck describes those days as a moment when, unable to persuade the king, he walked out of the room, so desperate and so close to a nervous collapse that he considered throwing himself from the window. The man who unlocked it was the Crown Prince. He went in to his father, held a conversation that lasted two hours, and by the time he came out the king had given way. Wilhelm wrote a bitter sentence in his own hand in the margin of Bismarck's memorandum: he said that after his army's brilliant victories he was being forced to bite into this sour apple.

An armistice was made on the twenty-second of July, the preliminary peace of Nikolsburg was signed on the twenty-sixth of July, and on the twenty-third of August, eighteen sixty-six, the Treaty of Prague brought the war to an end. The text is a textbook example of how measured a victor can be. Austria gave Prussia not a single inch of territory; she paid a symbolic indemnity and surrendered Venetia to Italy through the hands of Napoleon the Third. In return, the German Confederation, which had stood since eighteen fifteen, was dissolved, and Austria was shut out of German affairs entirely. Prussia annexed Hanover, Hesse-Kassel and Nassau, which had stood beside Vienna in the war, along with the city of Frankfurt and Schleswig-Holstein. The following year, all the German states north of the river Main were united in the North German Confederation under Prussian leadership. The question that had run for a century and a half — around whom would Germany gather? — had been answered in seven weeks.

The consequences spread outward in waves. In Paris, "revenge for Sadowa" became a slogan; the French realised too late that a great power had been born on their own frontier, and when they faced that power four years later they met the machine of eighteen sixty-six. On the eighteenth of January, eighteen seventy-one, the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles, and the man who took the crown was the same Wilhelm who had been forced to bite the sour apple at Nikolsburg. In Vienna, defeat pushed the empire into changing its internal structure: a compromise with the Hungarians was signed in eighteen sixty-seven, and the Austrian Empire spent the remaining half-century of its life as Austria-Hungary. In Prussia, the liberal opposition approved the law that, in September of eighteen sixty-six, retroactively absolved a prime minister who had governed in violation of the constitution; success had bought the principle. Every army in Europe took the lesson too, and for the next forty years they copied the Prussian model — the general staff, conscription and railway planning.

A single man was left outside this new world. Benedek stepped down from his command on the twenty-sixth of July, eighteen sixty-six. A military inquiry was opened against him, then halted by the intervention of the emperor; had the case gone forward, the decisions of the army and of the court would have stood trial as well. In December, the empire's official paper, the Wiener Zeitung — the Vienna Gazette — published a piece laying the entire responsibility for the defeat on him alone. Benedek was given no right of reply; he was ordered never to utter a single word about the circumstances of the battle for the rest of his life, and he obeyed that order. He withdrew to Graz, kept silent for fifteen years, and died on the twenty-seventh of April, eighteen eighty-one, without military honours. His papers, so the story goes, were burned after his death at his own request.

This is what Königgrätz really tells us: on the morning of the third of July, it was not two armies that faced one another, but two centuries. On one side, the old world — commanded by titles, prizing courage over order, carrying its news on horseback. On the other, a new kind of organisation, running on railway timetables, telegraph lines and shared training. The victor that day was not a commander, but a method. And because Europe had seen how quickly that method could win, it never looked at another war the same way again.

Nöron History'de bugünkü bölümün sonuna geldik. Yeni bir hikâyede yeniden buluşmak üzere.