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Updated: June 11, 2025
Both, Goethe as well as Moltke, are clever and artistic in handling pencil and brush as well as their descriptive pen. And now the style, in the narrower sense. It is natural, limpid, free from all rhetorical flourishes and wordiness, placing the right word in the right place. Xenophon, Caesar, Goethe, come to mind in reading Moltke's descriptions, historical expositions, reflections.
His tribe will have none until the responsibility incurred in the severance of Church and State sits less lightly on a Christian community, and the Church, from a mob, shall have become an army, with von Moltke's plan of campaign, "March apart, fight together." The Christian Church is not alone in its failure.
Moltke's pithy and laconic style was founded on the model of his chief, General von Müffling, his instructor in practical and theoretical tactics, in which the members of the German General Staff are required to excel. He was a graphic writer and shrewd observer of men and things, as his charming letters from Russia, France, Turkey, and other places show.
It was Moltke's opinion that the French proposed to make their stand before this impregnable fortress, and fight there desperately for victory.
Both works have resulted from diaries and letters actually kept, Moltke's work, however, more faithfully retaining and professing its formal nature.
Bismarck could hardly have foreseen that he should have to provide for an imperial prisoner. Moltke's marvellous plans of campaign could scarcely have embraced the details necessary to the immediate disposal of ninety thousand prisoners of war, with many guns and horses and much ammunition.
No jealous woman can look about her so calmly and serenely. "What have you been doing all this time?" he asked. "I? Good heavens! Look about you and you'll see." She pointed to a heap of books which lay scattered over the window seat and sewing table. There were Moltke's letters and the memoirs of von Schoen, and Max Mueller's Aryan studies. Nor was the inevitable Schopenhauer lacking.
Under Moltke's system, which has been applied in a greater or less degree to nearly all professional armies, the chance of mistakes has been much reduced.
He says, "The grandest illustration of Moltke's strategy was the battle of Gravelotte-Saint Privat; but the battle of Gravelotte has taught us one thing, and that is, the best strategy cannot produce good results if tactics is at fault." The right kind of tactics is not improvised. It asserts itself in the presence of the enemy but it is learned before meeting the enemy.
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.
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