throwing his two divisions across an entire army’s axis of movement. 32 The
tactical outcome depended essentially on the quality of the Prussian army at all
levels. But Moltke quickly understood its operational implications. France’s main
army was cut off, and Moltke’s revised intention was to turn the 2nd Army to the
north, face it to the rear, and use it to drive the French either back into Metz or
across the border into neutral Luxemburg and internment.
Gravelotte–St. Privat, fought on 20 August, was another soldiers’ battle, whose
heavy casualties resulted in a tactical victory but an operational dead end. The
immediate opponents shut themselves up in Metz. Moltke and Bismarck alike,
however, understood not merely the desirability, but the necessity, of a quick and
decisive end to a war whose continuation carried an increasing risk of destroying
the European balance instead of adjusting it in Prussia’s favour. The general and
the Chancellor correspondingly agreed on the next military objective. The new
French army forming at Chalons was the last of the Second Empire’s front-line
forces. Defeating it called for refocusing operational concepts that had temporar-
ily devolved to serving tactical objectives. Moltke took the 3rd Army, formed a
new Army of the Meuse from three corps of the 2nd Army, and headed west.
Moltke expected the Army of Chalons to retreat towards Paris. Instead, it
lurched forward with the ostensible goal of relieving Metz by marching around
Moltke’s right flank. ‘The dummies will pay for this’, remarked Moltke as he
swung his armies north, into the Argonne Forest. 33 Surprised and badly shaken in
preliminary fighting, the Army of Chalons fell back on the old fortress of Sedan to
‘regroup’. The Germans followed up and closed in, moving smoothly through
thick forests on poor roads, the corps marching separately but positioned by
Moltke and his staff subordinates to fight united. By the night of 31 August,
German bivouac fires formed an almost unbroken circle around the French
positions. ‘We have them in a mousetrap’, rejoiced Moltke. A hardbitten French
general found another metaphor: ‘we’re in a chamber pot, and tomorrow we’re
going to be shit on’. Both men were correct.
Sedan was Moltke’s last chance to make war at the operational level. Against the
revolutionary French Republic, the German forces were split three ways: pinned
down in a siege of Paris, fending off the improvised Republican armies’ effort at
relieving the city, dealing with an increasingly comprehensive guerrilla war, and
able to decide none of the situations. His intellectual response was the ‘Essay on
Strategy’ he composed in 1871. In it, he borrowed the familiar aphorism of
Austria’s Archduke Charles: ‘strategy is a science; tactics is an art’. But between
them was emerging a third category, a new reality. He wrote of ‘strategy’ as a
system of expedients—not a pure science but the application of science to
practical purposes: particularly maintaining an objective under the pressure of
constantly changing circumstances. What he was describing, however, was oper-
ational art: bringing the army to the right place at the right time and in the right
combinations to avoid stalemate in the field and sustain the commander’s
synergistic relationship with political authority. 34
For the next twenty years, Moltke developed the distinction between the aim of
war and the object of operations. The former was determined by the state. The
Prussian–German Operational Art, 1740–1943 43