showed afresh that such long-service armies were incomparably the best
form of military machine for the purpose of giving expression to a
hostile "view" (not "feeling"). Austrian armies triumphed in Italy,
French armies in Spain, Belgium, Algeria, Italy and Russia, British in
innumerable and exacting colonial wars. Only the Prussian forces
retained the characteristics of the levies of 1813, and the enthusiasm
which had carried these through Leipzig and the other great battles was
hardly to be expected of their sons, ranged on the side of despotism in
the troubled times of 1848-1850. But the principle was not permitted to
die out. The Bronnzell-Olmutz incident of 1850 (see SEVEN WEEKS' WAR)
showed that the organization of 1813 was defective, and this was altered
in spite of the fiercest opposition of all classes. Soon afterwards, and
before the new Prussian army proved itself on a great battlefield, the
American Civil War, a fiercer struggle than any of those which followed
it in Europe, illustrated the capabilities and the weaknesses of
voluntary-service troops. Here the hostile "view" was replaced by a
hostile "feeling," and the battles of the disciplined enthusiasts on
either side were of a very different kind from those of contemporary
Europe. But, if the experiences of 1861-1865 proved that armies
voluntarily enlisted "for the war" were capable of unexcelled feats of
endurance, they proved further that such armies, whose discipline and
training in peace were relatively little, or indeed wholly absent, were
incapable of forcing a swift decision. The European "nation in arms,"
whatever its other failings, certainly achieved its task, or failed
decisively to do so, in the shortest possible time. Only the special
characteristics of the American theatre of war gave the Union and
Confederate volunteers the space and time necessary for the creation of
armies, and so the great struggle in North America passed without
affecting seriously the war ideas and preparations of Europe. The
weakness of the staff work with which both sides were credited helped
further to confirm the belief of the Prussians in their system, and in
this instance they were justified by the immense superiority of their
own general staff to that of any army in existence. It was in this
particular that a corps of 1870 differed so essentially from a corps of
Napoleon's time. The formal organization had not been altered save as
the varying relative importance of the separate arms had dictated. The
almost intangible spirit which animates the members of a general staff,
causes them not merely to "think"--that was always in the
quartermaster-general's department--but to "think alike," so that a few
simple orders called "directives" sufficed to set armies in motion with
a definite purpose before them, whereas formerly elaborate and detailed
plans of battle had to be devised and distributed in order to achieve
the object in view. A comparison of the number of orders and letters
written by a marshal and by his chief of staff in Napoleon's time with
similar documents in 1870 indicates clearly the changed position of the
staff. In the _Grande Armee_ and in the French army of 1870 the officers
of the general staff were often absent entirely from the scene of
action. In Prussia the new staff system produced a far different
result--indeed, the staff, rather than the Prussian military system, was
the actual victor of 1870. Still, the system would probably have
conquered in the end in any case, and other nations, convinced by events
that their departure from the ideal of 1813, however convenient
formerly, was no longer justified, promptly copied Prussia as exactly,
and, as a matter of fact, as slavishly, as they had done after the Seven
Years' War.