The dean of military historians in the English-speaking world at the beginning of the twentieth century was Sir Charles Oman. He once wrote an essay called “A Plea for Military History,” in which he remarked that the civilian historian who dabbled in military affairs had always been an exceptional phenomenon, because, as he went on to explain, “Both the medieval monastic chroniclers and the modern liberal historiographers had often no closer notion of the meaning of war than that it involves various horrors and is attended by a lamentable loss of life. Both classes strove to disguise their personal ignorance or dislike of military affairs by deprecating their importance and significance in history,” which had the effect of discouraging scholarly study of war and leaving the field to professional soldiers.1
Theodor Fontane’s military writings have not escaped the kind of criticism implied by Oman’s words. In their own time his histories of the three wars of German unification were subject for the most part to the condescension of the soldiers, who assumed, without much reflection, that mere civilians were incompetent to understand the mysteries of their calling, an attitude that Fontane understood and accepted with good humor. But in more recent times, some critics have taken a line not dissimilar to that of the monastic chroniclers and liberal historians, arguing that war was not a subject suitable for a writer of Fontane’s talents and that the time he devoted to it was wasted.
Thus, in an otherwise perceptive study, Herbert Roch referred to a letter of Theodor Storm about a visit that Fontane had made to him during the Danish War and cited Storm as saying, “Despite his editorial responsibilities for the Kreuzzeitung, [Fontane] is a nice person with whom one can get along—and a poet.” Roch added,
Anyone who did not know [Fontane] more closely, would never in any circumstances [after his three war books] have thought of him as a poet. These are the most voluminous and unpoetical books that he left behind him, weighty tomes without any weight. Mere writing for hire. A publisher made him an offer to describe the Prussian campaigns with all the trimmings for a wider public. And he accepted. Unfortunately, one might say today. But for him these three thousand pages in lexicon format, which nobody reads any more and hardly anyone knows, belonged to the detours he had to take in order to reach his own vocation.
Choosing a standard that military historians in any age would find difficult to meet, Roch went on to say that Fontane’s “chronicles” had neither the pregnancy of Thucydides’ Pelopennesian War nor the drive of Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years War, and accused him of superficiality in describing the background and causes of the three conflicts and little more than journalistic talent in using the miscellaneous materials with which he sought to enliven his battle descriptions. He added that only the Danish book had a second edition, and that the others fell dead from the presses.2
In point of fact, Fontane’s war books have not been quite as neglected as Roch would have us believe. Over the years they have always found discerning readers, and interest in them has grown in recent times. Extensive selections from them are now available in the Nymphenburg edition of Fontane’s collected works;3 a handsome new illustrated edition of The War against France was published by the Manesse press in Switzerland in 1985;4 and plans are currently being made in the United States to publish all three of the war books in translation. Leaving that aside, however, we must concede that Roch’s principal point has some weight. There is no doubt that the writing of the war books did, for an appreciable time, postpone the dawn of Fontane’s career as a novelist, and that being so, we owe it to those who feel as strongly about this as Roch does to try to explain why Fontane chose to write the war books, what special talents he brought to the task, and what the war books had, and still have, to offer to readers whose minds are somewhat more open than is true in his case.
In August 1866 Fontane wrote to the publisher Wilhelm Hertz, with whom he had contracted to write a novel (the future Vor dem Sturm, published in 1876), to explain why, having already postponed it once in order to write about the war in Schleswig-Holstein, he was now giving a second war book, a history of the Austro-Prussian War, priority over it.
I want to write the war book, first because it will enable me to bring the Schleswig Holstein book to a proper conclusion, second because I take joy in and have a certain talent for such works, and third because I shall derive a considerable pecuniary advantage from it.5
Fontane was not exaggerating when he talked about his talent for writing about military affairs. For one thing, he possessed a command of what can be called the vocabulary of war, a familiarity with military terminology and usage that sometimes baffled laymen, who were apt not to know the difference between a brigade and a battalion or a howitzer and a 24-pound gun. From his father’s lectures on Napoleon’s campaigns and his own childhood reading—and, of course, from his own military service—he knew about such things as the ways in which armies are organized and the functions of the different branches of service and how they were supposed to support each other and what that involved; he understood tactical forms and movements and all of the other things that make armies effective fighting organizations; and he appreciated the mystique of command and its responsibilities and the ways in which it is exercised and the chains of communication that carry its impulses to the smallest of an army’s component parts. Without having read Clausewitz—at least, there is no reference to that great theorist in his books or letters—he was aware also that armies at war move in the most uncertain of media, that the simplest things in life become difficult in war, which is the province of what Clausewitz called friction, that companies and battalions and regiments, being made up of individuals, are subject to the faults of omission or commission of each of these, which may result in fatal delay or error, that rain and fog and fatigue conspire against perfection in the execution of orders, and that the difference between victory and defeat may be due less to the talents of an army’s commander than to accident or chance.6
Knowledge of these things gave Fontane confidence as he wrote about technical matters or described, and made judgments about, complicated operations. But his knowledge was reinforced by industry and method. Despite the fact that his accounts of the Danish, Austrian, and French wars were written very shortly after the events that they described, they are far from being mere exercises in journalism, and they have survived not merely because of their stylistic grace but because of their author’s search for every kind of material that would throw light upon the opposing strategies, the operations that gave them expression, and the physical and human context of the struggle. In his book The Schleswig Holstein War, his account of the attacks on the trenches at Düppel depends for its specificity and color upon letters and reports from frontline soldiers on both sides, just as his description of life in bivouac areas and at Prince Friedrich Karl’s headquarters in Gravenstein are derived in part from reports in the German and foreign press. In the immediate aftermath of the 1866 war, Fontane was zealous in collecting frontline testimony and at the same time wrote dozens of letters to commanders who could elucidate operational problems for him, like Colonel (later General) Franz von Zychlinski, commander of the twenty-seventh Infantry Regiment at Münchengra tz and Königgra tz, who became a firm friend.7 The bibliography to The German War of 1866 included the Prussian and Austrian General Staff histories of the war and the official staff reports of the Saxon, Bavarian, and Badenese armies; almost two dozen corps, brigade, regimental, and battalion histories; professional critiques of the operations by the well-known specialists Willisen, Dragomirow, and A. C. Cooke, as well as Captain Hozier’s reports from the Bohemian theater of war as they appeared in the Times of London; numerous personal memoirs and Tagebücher and accounts of single engagements; such professional journals as the Militair-Wochenblatt of Berlin and the Oesterreichische Militairische Zeitschrift; and sixteen German and Austrian newspapers. The bibliography appended to The War against France is even more impressive, including not only all of the then available official and semiofficial diplomatic and military works—white papers, war histories based on General Staff papers, operational histories of the separate armies and corps, and the like—but memoirs, diaries, and articles by soldiers, journalists, and private citizens in Germany, France, and England, and the files of twelve German newspapers. And this did not include personal testimony that Fontane received and miscellaneous information and opinion that he gathered from sampling the foreign press.
He was not content, however, to do his work in libraries. “Making books out of books,” he wrote to his wife in April 1871, “is not my affair.”8 He always felt it necessary to follow the principle that had guided him in the Wanderings and to see the terrain about which he intended to write. In the case of the Schleswig-Holstein war, he took advantage of the armistice of May 1864 to travel with a colleague from the staff of the Kreuzzeitung over the theater of war from the Eider to Flensburg and from there to the trenches of Düppel, which had been stormed by the Prussians a month earlier. Later in the year, after the final cessation of hostilities in July, he returned to the war zone, studied the terrain in which the Alsen operation had been launched, and traveled through Jutland, following the route of the Austrian II Corps and the Prussian Guards in their advance on Fredericia. Two years later, he followed the same procedure in the case of the Austrian war, going as soon as possible after the end of hostilities to view the scenes of the firefights at Podol, Münchengra tz, and Gitschin and the battlefield of Königgra tz and then turning westward to the area of operations of the Main Army and visiting the field of Langensalza.
Fontane wrote a number of articles about his wanderings in Bohemia, which were published in Rudolf Decker’s Berliner Fremdenund Anzeigeblatt in September and October 1866.9 In one of these, an account of the firefight at Podol on the Iser on 28 June 1866, between the avant garde of the Prussian First Army and the brigade commanded by General von Poschacher, he wrote about how study of the terrain is often vital to the understanding of operations. In the second phase of the battle, when the Austrian commander Clam Gallas sent two additional brigades forward to support Poschacher, the lead companies suffered such heavy losses that he gave up the attempt to hold the river crossing and ordered a general retirement, suffering a loss of 33 officers and 1,015 men (among them 500 prisoners) to a Prussian loss of 12 officers and 118 men.10 Fontane could not understand this result until he noted that the main route of retreat was flanked by a railway line at some distance to the west.
It seemed to me as good as certain that the fight was in the end decided by the advance on the flank (the railroad bed). Only in this way can one explain the five hundred prisoners. A mere frontal attack would have made it easy at any time for the enemy (which in addition brought elite troops into the fighting here) to have effected his retreat without a loss of prisoners.11
These visits to the battle sites in Bohemia, and those he made in 1871 to the scenes of major Franco-Prussian engagements at Amiens, St.-Quentin, Gravelotte, St.-Privat, and Sedan, were important not only for the flashes of illumination that they provided but also because they gave an authenticity to his battle accounts that could be attained in no other way. Moreover, they helped Fontane remain unshaken in the face of military critics who held that civilians did not understand enough about war to write about it. Commenting late in life upon this professional prejudice, Fontane pointed out that, provided the civilian historian had done his work carefully, there was no reason why he should not be as proficient as the military specialist, except perhaps on technical points, while on other matters he might be the more reliable commentator because he possessed “greater freedom and was less inhibited about bringing in extra-military factors, like the imponderables.” He added:
In the last analysis, the writing of military history is not at all different from the writing of history in general and is subject to the same laws. How does it go? You are confronted with a lot of material, and it is a question, given what you have, of making choices, for or against, yes or no. In addition, the depiction of the military-historical is to a very essential degree a matter for literary and not mere military criticism.12
This is perhaps too easily said. Fontane’s habit of shifting the perspective from which he viewed events and enabling his readers periodically to see the course of the fighting from the other side of the hill was, indeed, a literary device, and a successful one. Thanks to it, his readers were protected from the impression that the events he was describing had had to end as they did. By destroying the assumption of inevitability, by restoring to history the options that it once had, Fontane gave a tension and excitement to his battle accounts that was not usual in this kind of writing.
But the military historian is required not merely to describe but, like any other historian, to explain, and explanation involves making judgments, in his case, of such difficult questions as the strategy and tactics, the command decisions, the fighting qualities of the two sides. This is not an easy task, and in undertaking it he has to resist the tendency to find all of the victor’s actions commendable or, alternatively, to seek to give the impression of objectivity by overemphasizing the disadvantages that his opponent had to contend with or attributing his defeat to chance factors. It is an admirable feature of Fontane’s battle accounts that he was aware of this problem and strove to deal with it. He was evenhanded but hardheaded in his judgments, generous but just to the beaten foe, and, in matters where professional judgment was divided, careful to let his readers know the reasons for the disagreement. In his account of the Danish supreme commander’s decision to evacuate the Danewerk without fighting for it—a decision widely criticized by those who were influenced by the virtually unanimous opinion of the international press that this defensive line was invulnerable—Fontane not only made a reasoned defense of General de Meza’s action but also declared that by making it he had saved his whole army.13 In his treatment of the action of the Austrian cavalry at Stresetitz in the last phase of the battle of Kniggra tz, the last great cavalry action in history, he did not hesitate to write of “the misfortune and the bravery of these outstanding regiments,” which kept the Austrian line of retreat open for so long, but this did not prevent him from explaining the tactical and other skills of the Prussian horse that guaranteed their victory.14
When one remembers the emotionalism of the popular mind in Germany at the end of the Austrian war and during the whole of the conflict with France, one cannot but be impressed by another quality of Fontane’s war books, their freedom from ideological generalization and moralistic attitudinizing. This is especially true of the history of the war in France, which justified everything that Hans Scholz has said about Fontane’s “cool detachment” and the absence in his writing of any trace “of rancor, of mean triumph, of chauvinism and boasting.”15 Fontane wrote at a time when Gustav Freytag was claiming that the victory over France revealed “the power of divine providence in the apportionment of rewards and punishments,” when Heinrich von Treitschke was describing it as a triumph of German Kultur over French arrogance and superficiality, and when Richard Wagner was writing a patriotic farce called A Capitulation, which made light of the rigors of the siege of Paris and joked about the suffering and starvation of the French populace.16 One would look in vain for anything of the sort in The War against France.
This was true in part because Fontane was never, even momentarily, affected by the war fever that clouded the critical judgment of other writers. He was far from taking a romantic view of war and, after describing a particularly bloody firefight during the Schleswig-Holstein War, wrote that war had developed, or degenerated, into “a science of killing.”17 The murderous efficiency of the Prussian breech-loader (Zündnadelgewehr) made him think more of its victims than of the victories it brought. He was not, therefore, inclined to succumb to the popular mood. In “the patriotic excitement,” he wrote to his Tunnel colleague Karl Zöllner at the outset of the French war, there was “an endless amount of nonsense,” 18 and in a more elaborate description of his reaction to the rush of events, he wrote to his wife:
The whole situation works upon me like a colossal vision, a Wild Hunt that rushes over me; one stands and stares and is not sure what to make of it all. A Völkerwandlung organized by railroads, yet always masses, inside of which one whirls like an atom, not standing aside and in control but surrendered to the great movement without any will of one’s own. It is like being swept away, when someone shouts “Fire!” in the theater, to an exit that is perhaps not there, squeezed without pity, shoved, choked, a victim of dark impulses and forces. Many people like that, because it is an “excitement”;—I am too artistically organized to be comfortable in such circumstances.19
In a postscript, Fontane alluded to the news that had arrived the day before of the victory of the V Corps and the Silesian Regiments 46 and 47 at Weienburg and added:
My heart beat higher at this news, and yet I couldn’t free myself from a feeling of sorrow. What is all that for? For nothing! Merely so that Lude Napoleon can be firm in his seat or that the Frenchman can go on imagining that he is the prize specimen of creation—for such a chimera, the death of thousands!20
Even in 1866, the poet Fontane had shown that he was skeptical about the meaning of victory in war, writing after Königgra tz,
Ja, Sieg! Er hat die Herzen uns erhoben,
Es gab uns viel—er hat auch viel genommen;
Ein Tag de Ruhmes, aber schwer erkauft.
’nen Schleier über Not und Tod und Wunden.21
[Aye, victory! It has exalted our hearts,
Given us much and taken much away,
A day of glory bought at heavy cost,
A veil cast over misery, death, and wounds.]
At the beginning of 1871, celebrating the triumphs of the past year, he suggested that it might be well to bring them to an end.
Das alte Jahr, in Kampf und Mut und Streben,
Hat’s uns gefeit, gewappnet und gestählt.
Das neues Jahr, o woll’ auch das noch geben,
Das Eine noch, das uns allein noch fehlt:
“Laß jenen Ölzweig zu uns niederschweben,
Auf den ein jedes Herz jetzt hofft und zählt,
Zu allem, was das alte Jahr beschieden,
Du neues Jahr, o gib uns Frieden, Frieden!22
[The old year, in combat and courage and aspiration,
Has made us invulnerable, has armed and steeled us.
The new year, oh, may it also give us that,
The one thing that we still lack:
Let that olive branch bend down to us,
Which every heart now hopes for and counts on,
In addition to all that the old year blessed us with,
O thou new year, now give us peace, yes, peace.]
In the history of European diplomacy, the Schleswig-Holstein question was generally recognized as being one of peculiar complexity: the British foreign secretary Palmerston once said that only three men ever fully mastered it, and that one of these (Queen Victoria’s consort, the late Prince Albert) was dead, a second (a Foreign Office clerk) had gone mad, and the third (he himself) had forgotten it. The two duchies were personal possessions of the king of Denmark but not part of Denmark proper, an arrangement that was given a dangerous potential by the additional circumstances that, although they had been declared permanently inseparable by ancient writ, Holstein, almost completely German in population, was a member of the Germanic Confederation, Schleswig, which wanted to be, had a sizable Danish minority, and there was a strong nationalist (Eider-Dane) movement in Denmark that wished to absorb Schleswig into the kingdom. It was this combination of forces that had induced the people of Schleswig and Holstein to take advantage of the revolutionary situation in 1848–1850 to seek to win their independence from Denmark by force of arms, a movement aided by the Germanic Confederation and, rather feebly, by Austrian and Prussian forces but defeated in the end by the efficiency and élan of the Danish army and the diplomatic pressure of Russia and Great Britain, which took the lead in persuading the European Concert, in 1852, to restore the status quo ante bellum. This did not, however, stop the agitation of the Eider-Danes, and on 18 November 1863, after a change in dynasty in Copenhagen, the new king Christian IX signed a new constitution incorporating Schleswig into the kingdom. This led to Austrian and Prussian intervention and war against Denmark.
When Theodor Fontane wrote his account of the war, he began it with a long section on the history of the Schleswig-Holstein question since earliest times. This was done with authority and style: Fontane had long interested himself in the duchies’ affairs, and it will be remembered that in 1850, at a low point in his fortunes, he had actually set off to fight for their freedom. But he must have known, or suspected, as he began to write, that the early history of this confusing story had become largely irrelevant from the moment that the Austrians and Prussians intervened. For they did so not on behalf of the freedom of the duchies but rather to force the Danes to return to the basis of the 1852 settlement. And when the Danes refused to do so, even when they were defeated, Prussia and Austria simply took over the duchies as trustees, administering them jointly. This was not an arrangement that was destined to be amicable, and long before Fontane had finished his book relations between the two German powers had deteriorated sharply, largely because Prussia, more and more openly, was working for the outright annexation of the duchies, a result that the Austrians were bound to oppose by war, as they did in 1866.
None of this was clearly seen, of course, two years earlier, when the war began, and Fontane did not allow it to prejudice his account of the military operations. Instead, he stopped his discussion of the politics of Schleswig-Holstein when Christian IX signed the new Danish constitution of 1863 and turned his attention exclusively to the military mobilization it called into being and the war that followed.
His analysis of the two opposing forces was shrewd and argued, in an interesting way, that the outcome of the war was largely determined by the superiority of the German military system over the Danish one. Both the Austrian and Prussian armies were made up by longterm conscripts, backed in time of war by reserves composed of former soldiers who took part in periodic training exercises. The troops were well trained and armed and, in the case of the Austrians, blooded in the campaigns of Radetzky and the war of 1859. The Austrian commander was General Ludwig von der Gablenz, who had won the Ritterkreuz of the Maria Theresa Order at Kaschau in Hungary in 1849 and distinguished himself at Magenta in 1859. His opposite number in the Prussian army, Prince Friedrich Karl, had less field experience and in difficult situations—at Düppel in 1864 and on the Bistritz in 1866—had a tendency to discouragement and indecision, but these moods did not last long, and in general he was a thruster. Both the Austrian cavalry and artillery were considered to be outstanding. The Prussians, on the other hand, were outfitted with new infantry weapons and field guns that had not yet been tested in battle. Their infantry was young and spirited.
The Danish commander, Christian Julius de Meza, was the descendant of a Portuguese Jewish family that had come to Denmark in the eighteenth century. An artillerist, he had entered the service in 1807, at the time of the British bombardment of Copenhagen, had fought with distinction in the campaigns of 1848–1850 and distinguished himself in the battle of Idstedt in 1850. He had spent long years teaching in command and staff schools and was, perhaps, more of an intellectual than the average Austrian and Prussian staff officer. But it was thanks to his work that the artillery was the strongest arm in the Danish army, apart from its outstanding engineering corps. Less good was the infantry, and this, in Fontane’s view, was due to Denmark’s reliance on a militia system that did not provide for proper training. He wrote:
The doubling of the twenty-two battalions, which was ordered at the outset of the war, led to the use of men who were in part too old and in part too young, who had either not learned to use their weapons or who had forgotten how to do so. In the same way, the officer corps was supplemented by so-called reserve officers who were wanting in intellectual and even more in military education. The arming of the infantry was excellent in respect to weapons and clothing, but the real soldierly spirit was often lacking. The individual soldier, in and for himself excellent material, lacked physical and moral adaptability and self-reliance in action.23
This weakness, in Fontane’s view, determined the course of the war from the beginning.
The allied armies crossed the Eider into Schleswig on 1 February. To the west, the Austrians moved from Rendsburg up the railroad line to Ober-Selk, meeting heavy opposition from well-deployed troops and suffering not inconsiderable losses. At the end of the day, however, Colonel Leon Count Gondrecourt’s “Iron Brigade” had seized the heights of Ober-Selk and Königsberg and overlooked a considerable stretch of the supposedly impregnable system of trenches and bastions called the Danewerk. The key to this, however, was the fortress complex of Missunde, which dominated the Schlei. Here the Prussians had taken position after crossing the Eider and moving swiftly and unopposed northward from Eckernforde, and it appeared that a major battle would develop here. The Prussians, however, doubting that their artillery could force a capitulation, elected to pin down the bulk of the Danish force at Missunde, while sending a detachment downstream to effect a crossing of the Schlei at Arnis. Threatened on both flanks, the Danish General De Meza, as already noted, decided to pull out of Missunde and to evacuate the whole of the Danewerk.
Within a week of the opening of hostilities, therefore, the allies had done the apparently impossible, and the way was open to the north. Hot in pursuit of the retreating Danes, the Austrians caught them at Oeversee and, after a hard-fought battle, occupied Flensburg and were poised for a crossing into Jutland. To the east, the Prussians took the town of Schleswig without opposition and then moved toward the massive fortification complex of Düppel. A prime objective of the contending forces during the war of 1848–1850, Düppel had proved impregnable to German assault in May and June 1848 and was stormed by Saxon and Bavarian troops in 1849 successfully only after they had suffered dreadful losses. Nicknamed “der Blutloch,” Düppel was reinforced by the Danes after the end of hostilities and was now girdled by an elaborate complex of interconnected and supporting trenches, the so-called Düppeler Schanzen, ten in number, so arranged that troops attacking one of them received enfilading fire from others. The whole complex connected the waters of the Alsen Sound and the Wenningbund, which protected its flanks, and its powerful buttresses and redoubts derived additional protection from the Danish fleet, which included the redoubtable Monitor-type ironclad, “Rolf Krake,” which fascinated Fontane and led to some of the liveliest writing in his book.24
The Prussians took their positions before Düppel on 9 February and were still there two months later, a circumstance that led some bored war correspondents to complain that the Austrians were doing all the fighting in the war. One need only read Fontane’s meticulous description of the Düppel position, however, to understand that precipitate action might have been fatal. As it was, much time was spent on studying the terrain, trying the effects of various kinds of bombardment on the trench system, sending raiding missions to test the alertness and spirit of the defenders, investigating the possibility of an elaborate flanking operation by invading the island of Alsen, and waiting for the arrival of heavier artillery, since the guns available made little impression on the Danish defenses.
Meanwhile, the Prussian troops settled in good-humoredly and made the best of the situation. In one of his best, and most revealing, chapters, Fontane described life in the rear areas, at Gravenstein, where Prince Friedrich Karl’s headquarters was located and in the nearby villages and camps that served as bivouac areas for the troops. Gravenstein, where Friedrich Karl lived in the castle with a staff of six hundred and sought to determine the best way to get around the great obstacle before him, was a magnet for all sorts of people besides combatants. In its few cafés and guest houses were to be seen tourists, Schlachtenbummler, reporters for the leading German and Austrian papers and for the Times of London and the French and Scandinavian press, diplomats and military attaches from foreign powers, army suppliers and weapons salesmen, speculators and gamblers, and—the center of much attention—the exotic Enemotto Kamadiro and Fiune Taki, Japanese naval officers, who had come from The Hague to learn something about European ways of war.25 In the villages and camps where the troops were stationed, the atmosphere was lively and carefree, as if war were a kind of holiday. When on patrol the young Prussian troops developed an elaborate barter system with their Danish opposite numbers, in which the object of their greatest desire was the Danish water bottle, which was large, solid, and covered with tightly sewn leather. In their hours of recreation they played furious games of a kind of handball that they called Sauball and Bullenjagen. For the rest—and this betokens a certain innocence that was soon to disappear—they made up comic war games. They had discovered that the Danes were not very good shots, and they strove to induce them to give proofs of this. In one village, they found a large number of Mardi Gras dolls (Fastnachtpuppen) some of almost human size. These they dressed up in bits of uniform and gave them mock guns and stationed them behind hummocks or walls close to the Danish outworks, hoping to attract fire. A favorite pastime was to fashion mock artillery pieces, out of barrels or stovepipes and wheeled plows, placing these on rooftops and going through the ritual of loading and firing, simulating the sound of the discharge. When I was young, I once saw a Harold Lloyd film in which the hero and two friends are being pursued by a band of South American revolutionaries. They take refuge behind a wall, where they find a stovepipe and a drum. Lloyd points the former over the wall and, when one of his friends smites the drum, heaves a coconut in the general direction of the enemy and then blows cigar smoke through the pipe.26 I thought this was charming at the time, but I never dreamed that I would one day discover, from reading Theodor Fontane’s history of the Schleswig-Holstein war, that Prussian troops had done much the same.
All of these diversions halted at the end of March. The weather, generally bad, had become worse, making impossible the execution of the plan for an invasion of Alsen. Friedrich Karl finally decided there was no alternative to a frontal assault on Düppel and, after some probing attacks that revealed faults of determination and mutual support in the defense, sent his army forward. Starting on 17 April, the Schanzen were attacked by forty-six companies in storm columns, and before the next day was over they were in Prussian hands.
The doubts that had circulated about the fighting qualities of the Prussian army did not survive this victory, which the historian Droysen called “one of the events that mark an epoch in a nation’s history.” The young infantrymen who charged the trenches showed an élan, a courage, and an initiative that swept everything before them. Speaking of the capture of the first trench, Fontane wrote:
Soon after our companies had settled in Schanze I, “Rolf Krake” appeared, stationed itself in front of the trench and bombarded it with grenades. Lieutenant Schmolzer of the artillery, however, had brought the only usable gun that was left in the trench into position against the Wenningbrod and met “Rolf Krake” with well-aimed fire. He loosed off 14 rounds, of which several were seen to be hits. At any rate, “Rolf Krake” did not take up the fight and removed itself from the vicinity.27
As the attack proceeded, there were many instances of individual bravery and self-sacrifice, and Fontane wove them skillfully into his narrative: Major General Raven, fatally wounded at the head of his troops, calling to them, “A general has to bleed for his king too. Forward, comrades!”—the first Prussian general to die before the enemy since Scharnhorst;28 the sapper Klinke, who met his death while blowing a breach in Schanze II by throwing himself and the bag of gunpowder against the palisades;29 and the drummer Probst, who seized the colors from a dying comrade’s hand and led his company forward.
Tambour, schlag an!
Es gilt einem Mann,
Der stürmt mit Hurrah die Schanzen hinauf,
Und pflanzt die Fahne des Königs darauf.30
In this first significant victory since Waterloo, which signaled to Europe that Prussia was once more a military power of major consequence, it was perhaps natural that individual deeds of valor should almost immediately assume a legendary character.
The capture of Düppel broke the Danish will to resist, and subsequent allied actions—the crossing to Alsen31 and the bombardment and seizure of Fredericia32—were operations against a beaten and retreating army As Fontane had argued at the outset, the operational result in 1864 was merely the expression of the superiority of the German military system over that of its opponent.
The war that broke out between Austria and Prussia in 1866 exceeded in all of its dimensions—area of the theater of war, number of troops engaged, casualties, political consequences—those of the Danish conflict, and this involved new problems for Fontane. Instead of describing a war of fixed positions and frontal assaults, he had now to concern himself with strategies of movement and envelopment and with tactical operations that required the most sophisticated coordination between the different arms of the service. The result was a book that had far less of the homely and intimate detail of the Danish one but was more interesting in its handling of operations and its judgment of command decisions.
When it became apparent in the late spring of 1866 that war between the two great German powers was imminent, the Austrian command had two options. After concentrating the bulk of its forces at Olmütz in Moravia, it could either send it northward into Silesia to reclaim the province lost to Prussia in the first of Frederick’s wars; or, alternatively, it could mount a swift penetration of the mountain passes in northern Bohemia, sending its armies by way of Dresden directly against Berlin.
The Prussian chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, had to guard against both possibilities, which meant that he had to deploy his forces along an arc that extended from Torgau north of Dresden, where the so-called Elbe Army was stationed, over Görlitz and Hirschberg north of the Erzgebirge, the assembly area for Prince Friedrich Karl’s I Army, to the Neisse River, where the II Army of the Prussian crown prince provided a screen in front of Breslau. The Prussian dispositions were the subject of considerable criticism at the time from people who pointed to dangerous gaps in the line and who talked about the primary importance of concentration. But, of course, as Fontane pointed out, Moltke could not concentrate until he knew for sure in which direction the Austrians intended to move, and that he did not know until mid-June, when the tangled Schleswig-Holstein dispute reached its ultimate incarnation, when the Germanic Confederation, taking Austria’s side, called for a mobilization of federal troops against Prussia. At that point, Prussia declared the Bund dissolved, declared war on Hannover, the Electorate of Hesse, and the kingdom of Saxony, and, on 17 June, ordered its troops to advance toward Dresden.
These events galvanized the Austrians into action. Their commander, Feldzeugmeister August Ludwig von Benedek, was suddenly aware that, unless he broke out of Olmütz in Moravia, the assembly point of his Northern Army, and linked up with the Saxons, and possibly the Bavarian army, he was in danger of being outnumbered. On 18 June, he ordered an immediate advance of his forces—180,000 strong—to the fortress of Nikolsburg on the upper Elbe, with the evident intention of joining I Army Corps, commanded by General Eduard Count von Clam Gallas, and the First Light Cavalry Division, which were already stationed at Gitschin south of the Iser River, and then destroying the Prussian armies separately. This decision clarified the situation for Moltke, who nevertheless waited until the direction of the enemy march was confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt before ordering the commanders of I and II Armies to march through the mountain passes into Bohemia, seeking a junction with the Elbe Army in the vicinity of Gitschin.
What happened from then on, Fontane made clear, did so less because of the strategic vision of the two commanders than of other circumstances. Benedek’s hope of defeating the Prussians before they had united was crushed in the end by “the great tactical superiority [of the Prussian army], in which the Zündnadelgewehr played a not inessential role” and, on the other hand, by “obstacles that have been characterized as ‘the Austrian system.’ ” Elaborating on this, Fontane wrote:
The Austrian army command was in no way deficient in intellectual qualities, but rather in moral ones, and what was well-planned, daring, and well thought-out was not ruined by any violation of so-called fundamentals, but suffered shipwreck precisely on “the system,” on secret-mongering and officiousness, on rivalry and false scruples, on mistrust and selfishness.33
The key to the tactical weakness of the Austrian infantry lay in their reliance—which was not unaffected by a personal predilection of Emperor Francis Joseph—on the bayonet. The new drill regulations of 1862 prescribed shock tactics as the key in the offensive, and little emphasis was placed either on the firefight or on skirmishing. Both the war in Italy and that in Denmark seemed to validate this doctrine, and it was little noticed that in neither conflict had the Austrians been opposed by an antagonist proficient in delivering massed fire. But the Prussians, in the Zündnadelgewehr, possessed a breechloading rifle that was capable of firing five rounds a minute with 43 percent accuracy against formations at seven hundred paces; and its success in the Danish War, which was little heeded by the other powers, confirmed the Prussian army in its preference for a tactical doctrine that emphasized the offensive with advance in open order and aimed fire.
The devastating effects of this are apparent in Fontane’s accounts of the first encounters of the war—the Austro-Saxon operations against the Prussian I Army between the Iser River and Gitschin, and the Austrian attempts to prevent the Prussian penetration of the mountain passes at Nachod, Skalitz, Schweinschädl, Soor, and Trautenau. Over and over again, the Austrian losses were significantly higher than the Prussian: at Nachod, for example, 7,372 to 1,210;34 at Skalitz, 5,577 to 1,412.35 Even at Trautenau, where the Austrian X Corps, led by the former Austrian commander in Denmark, Lieutenant Field Marshal Ludwig von der Gablenz, shocked Bonin’s I Corps and drove it back in confusion to the bivouac area it had left the day before, Austrian losses exceeded those of the Prussians by three to one.36 One can understand the plaintive cry in the letter of an Austrian Landser at Königinhof, “Dear Peppi: I guess I won’t see you any more, for the Prussians are shooting everyone dead.”37
This grave disadvantage might have been offset by energetic leadership in the first stages of the war. But Benedek had made his reputation in Italy, where he had spent virtually all of his military career, and he lacked assurance in the theater to which he had been assigned. His doubts were reinforced by the fact that his chief of staff, Major General Gideon von Krismanic, former head of the Topographic Bureau, was a pedantic and basically timorous adviser, who did not believe in taking risks, and by the additional circumstance that the current chief of staff in Vienna, Lieutenant Field Marshal Alfred Freiherr von Henikstein, a perpetual naysayer who had no faith in victory, had also attached himself to his headquarters. This situation militated against decisiveness and was responsible for other errors, notably the long delay in moving north from Olmütz and the decision to leave what turned out to be an inadequate screen against the Prussian II Army when Benedek started his advance from Nikolsburg to Gitschin. Fontane was inclined to believe that Benedek himself was responsible for the failure of the Iser campaign, pointing out that he was apparently incapable of making up his mind whether the Iser line, or for that matter Gitschin, should be held or not, sending orders to his frontline commanders that changed from day to day.38
These faults at the top were compounded by sins of negligence, inattention to detail, and irresponsibility farther down the chain of command. In November 1866, Fontane passed through the mountainous terrain between Podol and Gitschin, following the line of the Austrian retreat from the Iser earlier in the year. In the vicinity of the Musky-Berg in particular, he was struck by the number of potential defensive barriers that had been left unreinforced by the Austrians, and he wrote, “A little prudence, a little good will, a little determination would have sufficed to turn this mass of rock into an invulnerable fortress. But it was Austria’s destiny that it was over and over again destitute of one or the other of these qualities (and often of all three).”39
It was a combination of these weaknesses that led to the loss of the battle that decided the war. Until three o’clock in the afternoon of 3 July, Benedek was confident of victory. On his left, his Saxon allies were holding a strong position at Problus and preventing any advance by Herwarth von Bittenfeld’s Elbe Army. In the center, the Prussian I Army had been for hours under bombardment in the woody terrain along the Bistritz River, unable to make progress and nearing the end of its endurance. Had Benedek committed his reserves here, the victory might have been his. But he kept delaying, on the advice of aides, and meanwhile paid too little attention to his right flank, toward which the Prussian II Army was slowly but surely advancing. This latter mistake was shared by those of his command who were stationed there.
The key to the defenses on the right flank was the village of Chlum, situated on the ridge of the chain of hills that overlooked Benedek’s headquarters at Lipa. Chlum was held by the brigade of Major General von Appiano, who had, however, shortly after one o’clock, ordered elements of his force who were under fire to retire from Chlum to a place below and out of sight of the ridge. Fontane writes:
The momentary protection which their changed position gave them was dearly paid for later. The officers had a presentiment of that. They said to themselves that the heights that they gave up voluntarily would shortly have to be stormed again. But the strict order left them no choice. . . . The defense of the village was entrusted to the commander of the Regiment Sachsen-Meiningen, Colonel Slaveczi, apparently no very fortunate choice. He was short-sighted and seemed to have only the vaguest conception of a Prussian II Army or of the possibility of its making an appearance and to the end answered reports that came to him suggesting this with the stereotyped phrase, “You are a calamity-monger [Schwarzseher].”40
Against this slack defense forward elements of the crown prince’s II Army achieved complete surprise. At about three o’clock, the first battalion of the First Regiment of Foot of the Guards burst out of the fog and into Chlum, killing or capturing all of its defenders. Counterattacks proved powerless to dislodge them, and they were soon, in any case, reinforced. For Benedek, the battle was now as good as over. His hope of smashing Friedrich Karl’s army on the Bistritz had been vitiated, his headquarters at Lipa had become untenable, and his whole army was in danger of encirclement.
Theodor Fontane’s history of the Austro-Prussian War—of which the storming of Chlum forms the climax—is distinguished by the clarity and detail of its battle scenes, not only those touched upon here but also those—the last bitter fighting as the Austrians fell back toward Königgratz, and the Prussian operations against the Hannoverians at Langenzalza and against the army corps of the German Confederation on the Main—that have had to be left out. Fontane’s concentration on this aspect of the war prevented him from writing the kind of relaxed passages that one finds in his book on the Danish War in which he discussed the history of the area being fought over, or recounted local legends (like that of “the hostile brothers” of Missunde), or reflected on the process of war itself and the reaction of people to it.
In one notable instance, however, he did write a somber counterpart to the happy account of camp life in the book on the Schleswig-Holstein War. This was his chapter “Gitschin on 30 June,” which described the appearance of that historic city, once the home of the imperial Feldherr of the Thirty Years War, Wallenstein, on the day after the battle that had expelled the Austrians from the town and forced them to fall back to the west In this powerful piece of writing Fontane expressed something of his own growing disenchantment with war. He wrote:
All of Gitschin was a lazaret. Everywhere there was want, of food, of bandages, of surgical help. . . . Wounded Austrians and Prussians, wearing the Schleswig Cross or the Düppel Medal, now, in common misery, revived their old comradeship in arms and supported and comforted each other. . . . The churches offered a particularly gripping and picturesque impression. High procession lanterns, carved in the baroque manner and painted red, between them banners from the Thirty Years War, dusty, tattered, hung from or stood against the walls. On the steps of the altar, however, crouched Hungarian hussars, some wrapped in blue and gold cloaks, some in white; the bright morning light fell upon eagle feathers and kucsma. Italians from the Regiment Sigismund lay around in the aisles and niches, one with a rose between pale lips. Bohemians from the 18th Jaeger battalion cowered in the pews and looked pleadingly at the picture of Mary, begging for help—or release. At the side, on the bare tiles and leaning against the pillared wall, sat a Bohemian woman, and close by her a mutilated soldier from the Regiment Gyulai. The woman had fallen asleep from exhaustion. The mutilated one didn’t move. He had laid his arm around his protectress and drawn he her head to his breast. . . . On the evening of the 30th, two thousand wounded lay in Gitschin. A similar large number were put up in the hamlets and villages in the immediate vicinity of the battlefield.41
Fontane’s history of the war against France is probably the best of his war books. Certainly it is the best written, the one with the greatest epic sweep, and the one that is the most modest in the name of Germany. Perhaps this was because, when he wrote it, he was reacting against the public mood at the end of the war with France. After having been content to ascribe Prussia’s victory over Austria to “mass education, sense of honor, love of fatherland, Zündnadel, tactics, and higher command,”42 he was appalled by the jingoism and social Darwinism that was prevalent in Germany in 1871 and the assumption, later castigated by Nietzsche, that the war had been a victory for German culture.43 He never for a moment believed that the French were inferior to the Germans in any fundamental sense, however much they may have suffered in battle from the technological advantages enjoyed by their opponent. In his book about his own misadventures in France after the war—his capture at Domrémy while doing research for his war book and his subsequent imprisonment—he annoyed a good many Prussian patriots, including his own soldier son George, by pointing out that the French were really very much like the Germans and by praising their fortitude, their resilience and their humor.44
The glorification by the press of Prussian military exploits in France also alarmed him, for he sensed that it was potentially dangerous and might give the military an inflated conception of their own worth and lead to an excessive degree of military influence in public affairs in the postwar period. In his account of his trip through northern France and Alsace Lorraine in 1871, he gave an unflattering portrait of the young Prussian lieutenants who were moving into the occupied territory and spoke of the dubious blessings of being ruled by “climbers, adventurers, and persons who were restless and ambitious.”45 While he was in detention at Moulins, he had, for want of other reading matter, read fifty pages of Rabou’s La grande Armée, an unrelieved paean to Napoleon’s genius and the army that followed him. He did so with growing discontent and, laying it aside, said to himself, “Such books you write yourself. If they are just like this, they’re worthless. The mere glorification of the military, without moral content and elevated aim, is nauseating.”46
Fontane approached the formidable task of writing a history of the Franco-Prussian conflict, therefore, with a strong sense of the dangers that the public mood posed for anyone seeking to be objective, but with the resolve, nevertheless, to write a book that would be as complete and as free from prejudice as possible. The result, four stout half volumes that totaled some nineteen hundred pages and, after beginning with a bravura description of the atmosphere in Ems in July 1870, described the Prussian invasion of France and the victory of Moltke’s strategy at Sedan, the guerre a` outrance fought by the new French Republic, the battles for Orleans, the siege of Paris, and the desperate but unavailing campaigns of Chanzy, Faidherbe, and Bourbaki—was impressive enough to meet the most exacting standard.
The comprehensiveness of the work is less important than the understanding that Fontane brought both to the hardihood and the sacrifices required of the soldier in the ranks, which he sometimes points up by a studied juxtaposition of the kind of sentimental doggerel that the war produced and the casualties that it demanded, and to the frailties of judgment to which commanders are prone in the heat of battle. Without in any way depreciating the superior staff work, the coordination of arms, and the dedicated leadership that were responsible for Prussian victories in the field, he constantly reminds his readers that the foe was a worthy one. His account of the bloody fight at St.-Privat ends with the words:
The French army—and this cannot be said often enough—was excellent. Never had the Empire, either the first or the second, placed anything better in the field. The enemy was defeated by a power that was superior to him in numbers, in self-confidence, and above all in leadership. The armies themselves were equal.47
The same balance characterized his analysis of the tactics of the opposing forces and the errors of command that determined the issue. Fontane showed no hesitation about putting his finger on crucial failures of judgment, but he was always quick to add that war was a realm in which mistakes were easily made. Thus, his assessment of Bazaine’s conduct of the battle of Vionville concluded that the French commander should have been better informed about the size and the march route of the army corps opposing him, but then continues:
Precise knowledge of the enemy, when it is a matter of whole square miles covered with troops, is under the most favorable circumstances imaginable always a highly difficult task. In the pressure of time and events, however, acquiring any of that kind of exact knowledge becomes almost an impossibility. The reports are inadequate or contradict each other, and at best you are at the mercy of guess work. Bazaine’s guesses, however, were justified.48
One of the most attractive features of The War against France and one that distinguished it from other accounts of the war that were published in Fontane’s lifetime was the unusual role that he gave foreign observers and commentators.49 The number and variety of quotations from British and French politicians and especially from English and French newspapers not only stand as testimony to the breadth of Fontane’s miscellaneous reading but also add to the overall objectivity of the book’s tone and to its color. By such excerpts Fontane was often able to heighten the verisimilitude of his account and to provide circumstantial descriptions of the étappe and of such things as the war’s effect on civilian life and the practical results of the decrees of national emergency that were issued by the French government after Sedan. In this connection, his brilliant use of historical flashbacks to illuminate regional differences and the attention he paid to careful geographical description deserve high praise, as does the care he devoted to character studies in the drama he was describing.
The War against France was, in short, a book in which the most critical of historians might have taken pride, and Fontane was well pleased with it. He quickly discovered, however, that others were less so and that these included not only the majority of contemporary military writers but also the king-emperor whose triumph the book celebrated. Fontane had believed that after his hard work he had a right to expect some kind of recognition from his government. But when the Prussian minister of the interior asked the emperor rather obliquely whether he wished to reward the writer in any way, Wilhelm replied in the negative, Fontane wrote sardonically to his friend Mathilde von Rohr:
I have worked day and night for twelve years on these war books; they celebrate, not in great words but in felt ones, our people, our army and our king and emperor. In 1864 I traveled through a Denmark that had been fanaticized against us; in 1866 I was in a Bohemia that was filled with roving bands and with cholera; and I escaped with my life in France only by a miracle. Unfrightened, because my work required the risk, I went back to the place of danger. Then my work began. And there it stands, if nothing else, the product of great industry, and representing with respect to its subject matter a unique thing in respect to which one has a right to expect the interest of the emperor, the hero of this great epic. . . . And it is precisely this hero and emperor, who, when he is asked “whether he has a reason to wish the author of this comprehensive work well or to be gracious to him,” answers the question by saying No.50
It was a disappointment all the more galling because of the ingratitude that it revealed in those who caused it. Fontane swallowedit as philosophically as he could. “Eh bien,” he wrote. “It’s got to be so. But really it has done more for my embitterment than for my moral improvement.”51 He consoled himself by reflecting that the writing of the war books had in itself been rewarding—he said later that it was the writing of The War against France that made him a writer52—and turned his attention to the work for which he is now chiefly remembered.