[[9]] Von der Goltz's papers on Rossbach and Jena appeared in 1882.
CHAPTER IV
THE CHIEF OF THE GENERAL STAFF
In the best work the man is more than the school. An ordinary man gives out no more than has been put into him. All his performances can be explained by his antecedents. But the best workers contribute from themselves an element which no analysis can adequately explain. A Newton or a Columbus, a Stanley or a Whitworth, has some unseen spring of force and insight.
A man of this stamp is required at the head of an army, and above all at the head of the organization entrusted with the design of operations.
The eve of a war is always accompanied by a great outburst of feeling, which in ninety-nine men out of a hundred manifests itself as an excitement, a disturbance, interfering with the action of the judgment and distorting the view of persons and events. But this is the very time when the weightiest decisions must be taken. The provisional plan of concentration, the result of careful preparation in quieter times, has to be reconsidered in relation to the circumstances of the moment, and definitely settled and adopted. The judgment of the strategist must therefore be perfectly clear, uninfluenced by the emotions which he shares with the rest of his countrymen.
When the concentration has been ordered, and while the armies are in movement, come the first collisions, following one another in quick succession. Every day brings its surprises, even to the best informed and best prepared headquarters. The strategist's equilibrium must be disturbed as little by unexpected events as by the throbs of national emotion. He must prepare the way for a decisive battle. No one knows better than he the terrible nature of the sacrifices which it will involve, and the stakes which are risked upon its issue. The lives of thousands will be lost; many thousands will be wounded; a mistake, miscalculation, or mishap may lead to defeat, with far-reaching, perhaps disastrous, consequences to his country. But under the weight of this vast responsibility the strategist's judgment must work smoothly and easily, like the compass in a storm, with no derangement of its delicate equipoise.
The man whose insight remains clear, whose judgment retains its even balance, when the greater part of mankind are stunned with the awe of great events, who remains true to himself while others are carried away by what seems an irresistible current, is not cast in the common mould. Ordinary men shrink into insignificance beside him. He is separated from the average officer by a gulf which no system of training can bridge. The inner calm which neither great occurrences, nor danger, nor responsibility can disturb cannot be imparted, and no method can be prescribed for its acquisition.
The natural place for a leader of men is in the supreme command. Where a general of this type is at the head of an army he will himself superintend the work of strategical preparation such as is carried on in the office of the great general staff at Berlin. His chief of the staff will be a confidential assistant, whose main function will be to lighten for him the burden of detail, and the two men will stand to one another in the same relation as that which subsists between the general commanding an army corps and the chief of the general staff of the corps.
In Prussia the king is the head of the army, and there are good reasons why he should take the field in person—reasons which have not been weakened by his becoming also German Emperor. A king who keeps in his own hands the general direction of the Government cannot very well work out for himself the problems involved in the strategical preparation of a campaign. His chief of the staff becomes his strategical adviser, alike during peace and war, and occupies a position of far greater importance than the assistant to a professional commander-in-chief. King William I., in the two great wars in which he took the field, reposed entire confidence in his chosen chief of the staff; and to the fine character which could do this without loss of dignity, as well as to the genius of Moltke, must be attributed the success with which in these wars the armies were directed. Moltke always attributed to the king the responsibility for the strategical decisions, and that quite correctly; but the king equally correctly regarded Moltke as their source, and attributed the success of the army to Moltke's "conduct of the operations."[[1]] The victories of Prussia in 1866, and of Germany under Prussian guidance in 1870, were due to the perfect understanding between the king and Moltke, a relation equally creditable to them both. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the king exercised the supreme political as well as the supreme military authority, and that in the political department, too, he had in Bismarck a trusted adviser, the counterpart of Moltke. Thus was secured the harmony between the political and the military direction which is essential to great success in war. From the exceptional characters of the king, of Bismarck, and of Moltke, and from the equally exceptional relation between them, it would be rash to deduce a system, which in any case could be applicable only to the case of a king wielding the entire executive power.