BY KARL DETLEV JESSEN, PH.D.
Professor of German Literature, Bryn Mawr College
To relate, in detail, the story of the life of General-Fieldmarshal Graf Helmuth von Moltke—or, as we shall briefly call him, Moltke—means to give an account of that memorable phase of modern history, perhaps, so far as Europe is concerned, the most important of the nineteenth century. This was the ascendency of Prussia, of her king and of her people, culminating in the unification and the consolidation of most of the German states into one great empire, with all its realization of military and political power, of social, economic, and, in a wide sense, of cultural eminence and efficiency. The barest outlines, however, must suffice for the present purpose.
Moltke was born at the threshold of the century the history of which he so prominently helped to shape, on October 26, 1800, at Parchim in the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. On his father's side he descended from a family of the North German gentry which had come to various degrees of prominence in some German as well as Scandinavian states. No doubt he inherited the military instinct from this race of warriors, statesmen, and landholders; a race the characteristic traits of which indicated the line along which he was bound to develop, the field in which he was to manifest his greatest achievements. But there is just as little doubt that all the elements of character which exalted his military gifts and instincts into an almost antique nobility, simplicity, and grandeur—his dignity, purity, dutifulness, his profound religious devotion, and sense of humor—came to him from his mother, who was descended from an ancient patrician family of the little republican commonwealth, the once famous Hansatown of Lübeck. How far the Huguenot strain may have influenced him, through his paternal grandmother, is hard to tell, since we know but little of Charlotte d'Olivet.
After the family had moved to Holstein, where his father failed to make a success of an agricultural undertaking for which he seems to have lacked fitness, young Moltke entered the Royal Danish Military Academy as a cadet, and there passed his lieutenant's examination with distinction; but he sought and found a commission under the Prussian eagle. He entered the eighth grenadiers at Frankfort-on-the-Oder. A year later, in 1823, he was sent to what is now called the War Academy in Berlin. Only by the closest economy and by some outside work, partly literary, as we shall see, he managed to get along with his exceedingly small officer's pay. He distinguished himself however so much that he became, successively, a teacher at the Division School and an active military geological surveyor, and finally was taken into the General Staff of the Army. Becoming a first lieutenant in 1832, a captain in 1835, ahead of many of his comrades, he served exclusively in strategical positions. During the four years, 1835-39, he, with some comrades, was in the Turkish dominions for the purpose of organizing and drilling the Turkish Army. He witnessed, as an active participant, the Turkish defeat by the insurgent Egyptians at Nisib on the Euphrates, which was brought about by the indolent obstinacy of the Turkish commander-in-chief. Like Xenophon, Moltke retreated toward and reached the Black Sea. At Constantinople he obtained honorable dismissal from the Sultan. After his return to Prussia he became chief of the General Staff of the Fourth Army Corps. In 1841 he married Mary Burt, a young relative who was partly of English extraction. The union developed into an unusually happy married life, in spite of, or partly because of, their great difference in age.
[Illustration: MOLTKE ANTON VON WERNER]
His wife, by whom he had no issue, lived to see the beginning of his great achievements and fame, but died in 1868, before his proudest triumph. Various commands led him to Italy, Spain, England, and Russia as adjutant of Prussian princes. In 1858 he was appointed chief of the General Staff of the Prussian Army—the institution which he shaped into that great strategical instrument through which were made possible, from a military point of view, the glorious successes of the three wars—1864, 1866, 1870-71—and which has become the model of all similar organizations the world over.
Side by side with the overtowering political achievement of Bismarck and the more congenial life work of Roon, the minister of war, Moltke's service to his country and his king stands unchallenged in historical significance. He has indelibly inscribed his name on the tablets of history as one of the world's greatest strategists. But he did not lay down his work until extreme old age; in 1888, as he so simply put it in his request for relief from duty, he resigned his office, because he "could no more mount a horse." He, however, still remained president of the Commission of National Defense and his last speech in the German Reichstag, of which he had been a continuous member since its establishment, he delivered on May 14, 1890. He died on April 24, 1891. The nation felt that one of its great heroes had passed away.
In two congratulatory documents on the occasion of Moltke's ninetieth birthday, Theodor Mommsen, the historian, has summed up the results of the great soldier's life-work—in the address presented by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and in the honorary tablet of the German cities. These inscriptions may be found in Mommsen's Reden und Aufsaetze. Shortly after Moltke's death, in a commemorative address at the same Academy, the historian and Hellenist Ernst Curtius reviewed Moltke's relations to historical science and his achievements in military science and in history. The Academy had appointed the Fieldmarshal an honorary member in 1860 for his great achievements in the military, geographical, and historical sciences. Professor Curtius in the address draws the outlines of Moltke's character as a student, and explains how he is indebted to the teachings of Karl Ritter, the founder of scientific geography, how he clearly develops under the influence of Niebuhr, Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch, and Erman, the physicist. He points out how Moltke, as historian and as an expert cartographer, introduces scientific spirit and work into his great creation, the German General Staff. As a strategist, however, it remains to be said that he follows in the footsteps, puts into practice and develops the methods of General von Clausewitz, the first mind who put war on an empirical and scientific basis. Moltke was intimately acquainted with Gibbon through a nearly completed rendering into German of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a translation which, unfortunately, never was printed and seems to be lost even in manuscript. As his favorite books and writers Moltke mentions, among others, Littrow's Astronomy, Liebig's Agricultural Chemistry, Clausewitz's On War, Ranke, Treitschke, Carlyle. It appears, then, that his scientific equipment was of the most solid sort, enabling him to make the most valuable contributions to knowledge.
It is impossible to imagine to oneself Moltke breaking into tears, either of wrath or of despair, in great crises of his life, such as we know to have been the case with Bismarck. There is a contrast between these two men in their very makeup. There is tragedy in Bismarck's soul, in its volcanic eruptiveness and its conflicts. He is nervously high-strung in the extreme, the very embodiment, in Karl Lamprecht's terminology, of the type of "Reizsamkeit." He likes to listen to Beethoven's music and his sense of nature reveals him to be impressionable, sensitive. His gamut of emotions and feelings, and their expression, is extraordinary. Moltke, on the other hand, appears to be always in harmony with himself, he is far less impulsive than his great contemporary and friend. His feeling, always awake for nature, has no element of morbid and pathetic sentiment; in the earlier stages of its manifestation we see it slightly tinged by Romanticism. But he is at peace with nature, his great comforting mother. There is no sudden and surprising break in his mental or spiritual development. The ideal of the strategist, as antiquity saw it, appears to be consummated in his person. William James, himself an ardent pacificist, well observed that in the modern soldier there is a matter-of-factness far removed from the bluff and make-believe of modern life in general. He might have chosen Moltke as the best type of this sort of warrior. But there was much more than this scientific and dutiful soldier; there was at bottom of Moltke's nature a fine sense of proportion, an artistic vein, and, not the least element, a Christian philosophy of life just as far removed from mere perfunctory indifferentism as from cocksure dogmatic bigotry and self-sufficiency. We have striking evidence of this in the Trostgedanken, the Consolatory Thoughts on the Earthly Life and a Future Existence, which he laid down as the last literary utterance of his full and eventful career. But this is not all; for most astonishing of all in the richness of this well-rounded harmony of over ninety years of life is a lively source of humor, due more to endowment and inheritance from his mother than to her influence, as his letters to her bear witness. When war is declared in 1870 he remarks that a new vitality has entered his carcass, and, on the very eve of his demise, when in the morning he had attended a session of the Upper House of the Prussian Diet, loyal to his work and task to the very last moment, he closed the last and winning game of whist he played with the quotation of that grim bit of humor characteristic of Frederick the Great and his soldiery: "Wat seggt hei nu to sine ollen Suepers?"