(^242) Chapter Seven
Armies, on the other hand, were insulated from the initial impact of
the mid-nineteenth century mutation in methods of gunmaking by the
simple fact that anything too heavy for horses to pull across open
country was ruled out for field artillery. But after the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870–71, armies too found themselves swept into the vortex
of a rapidly evolving artillery technology. In that war, Prussian
breech-loading steel guns outclassed the bronze muzzle-loaders with
which the French entered the fray. After 1871, European armies
therefore rapidly changed over to guns of the new design. Even more
important, Prussian models of army management and mobilization
became normative. Only insular Britain held back. To understand how
this happened, we must review European and American experience of
war in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The greatest armed struggle of the period, the American Civil War,
had little impact across the Atlantic. Europe’s soldiers were unim
pressed by the scale and intensity of mobilization Americans attained.
On the surface, the Civil War was sloppy and unprofessional. Spit and
polish were conspicuously absent. Battles were untidy and confused;
campaigns bogged down; no ruling class existed, even in the South,
with which European officers felt much rapport. For all these reasons,
together with the general sense that their skills were superior to those
of the United States, European military professionals felt that they
could safely disregard the American experience of war. Only later, in
the 1920s, did it become possible to recognize in the bitter struggle
between North and South a presage of World War I. The American
Civil War then took on a new significance as the first full-fledged
example of an industrialized war, in which machine-made arms dic
tated new, defensive tactics, while railroads competed with waterways
as arteries of supply for millions of armed men.
After initial setbacks, the Union generals, being unable to over
come the superiority that rifled small arms gave to the defense, turned
the struggle into a war of attrition. Decisions in the field came to
depend on the ability to threaten the enemy’s flow of supplies. Final
victory required disruption of the transport and administrative sys
tems by virtue of which the Confederacy had supported its armies
from far in the rear.
At the siege of Sevastopol, less than a decade before, peasant carts
had vainly sought to match deliveries by ship. But both the Union and
the Confederacy had railroads at their disposal. Not surprisingly,
A New Paradigm: The Prussian Way of War
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