(^250) Chapter Seven
and many an earlier rival by making peace after defeat, the better to
fight again another day. War, conceived as the sport of kings and an
affair of professional armies, was best managed in such away. Austria’s
great misfortune after 1848 lay in the fact that the Hapsburg monar
chy and the Hapsburg traditions of statecraft were becoming archaic,
quite unable to tap the deeper springs of human action and passion
which more popular governments could command.
Assuredly, the national pride and yearnings for collective greatness
that the Prussians unleashed by their reorganization of the Germanies
in 1866 had no place in the Hapsburg scheme of things. Bismarck,
however, skillfully contrived a partnership of state and people, such as
Scharnhorst and his fellow reformers of the early nineteenth century
had envisioned. Indeed, Bismarck’s feat of political prestidigitation,
linking reaction to revolution within the framework of the Prus
sian state, was quite as critical for Prussian victories as Moltke’s
professionalism.
As a matter of fact, once the advancing Prussian armies marched
into Bohemia, their supply system fell into considerable disarray. Ca
pacity to ship by rail far exceeded the capacity to deliver food and
ammunition from the railheads by road and wagon. Despite Moltke’s
best efforts, an enormous confusion prevailed along the roads the
Prussians used for their advance. Only by driving ahead as fast as men
and horses could go, leaving supply trains behind and accepting severe
shortages of food and fodder, did the Prussians succeed in carrying
through their concentration at Koniggrâtz. The Austrians suffered
from similar difficulties of course, even though they moved more
slowly. But had the war lasted longer, and had the Hapsburg regime
not been ready to negotiate peace after its initial defeat, supply diffi
culties would have caught up with the advancing Prussians and might
well have brought their swift and dramatic success to a halt.^41
No such limitation on Prussian war-making capacity was evident in
the first weeks of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, for it began
with even more spectacular victories than those of 1866. Moreover in
1870 the Prussians overwhelmed an army deemed the best in Europe;
and one which had reacted to the news of 1866 by reequipping itself
with breech-loading rifles superior in performance to Prussia’s needle
guns. Napoleon III intervened personally to hasten production of the
new rifles, which were based on a design developed by a French
lieutenant as far back as 1858. Fittingly the new gun was named chas-
- Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cam
bridge, 1977), pp. 79–82; Craig, Koniggratz, p. 49.