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Franco-German War of 1870–71

Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke

Written between 1887 and 1888, this is v. Moltke’s history of the Franco-German War in which he himself played such a critical role. This translation was originally published in two volumes in 1891—the year Moltke died—by Henry William Fischer and Clara Bell. As the [i]Pall Mall Gazette[/i] relates of it in 1892, it “. . .needs most careful revision before English readers will get from the book that which it is best able to impart. But the book itself is a rich mine to the student of war, and when freed from the translators’ blunders it ought to become one of the first text-books of modern warfare.” If anything the gazette’s reviewer felt the work could have been more concise; “It is a thoroughly German book—above all, German in its thoroughness.” And yet, as Moltke himself notes in the preface, the book was written for precisely the purpose of creating a more concise narrative than that found in the official history! As the gazette desired, revised the translation would be. This early 1893 edition has had the translation tidied up by Archibald Forbes who was a war correspondent for the Daily News during the Franco-German War, imbedded with the Germans, and was present at various battles related in this history. In Forbes’ 1895 memoir, [i]Memories and Studies of War and Peace[/i], he gives various descriptions of Moltke; “Moltke was a singularly quiet and unostentatious man. It was quaintly said of him that, ‘he could be silent in seven languages,’ and he was nearly as great a linguist as he was a strategist.” A “. . .lean man with the slight stoop of the shoulders, and the fleshless, strong-lined face out of which the keen blue eyes looked with quiet alertness. You might have taken him for a professor of mathematics, but he was the greatest strategist of the age.” Moltke’s history, as Forbes states at length, is not without error; “How powerful is the glamour of Moltke’s name was evinced in the all but unanimous gush of indiscriminate and uncritical eulogy with which this posthumous book was received. His prestige is so high that it is probable the work might be accepted both by writer and by students of war as absolutely accurate,” he says, before—as an eye-witness and a man who “had the honour of some personal intercourse with Count Moltke in the course of that war”—highlighting some of the errors he perceived in the work (see page 50 of Memories and Studies). Moltke is in many respects an enigma. “As a skillful, untiring, and farseeing organiser of the means which make for success in war, Moltke has never had an equal, and probably, in those respects, will never have a superior,” opines Forbes; “Still less has any power produced a strategist who has given proof of ranking as Moltke’s peer. Thus it is impossible to gauge the full measure of Moltke’s potentialities. He may have had reserves of strategical genius which were never needed to be evoked. It is impossible to determine whether in the Franco-German War he put forth his full strength, or only so much of it as was proportionate to the requirements suggested by the known inferiority of the adversary.” - Summary by Alister