The Story So Far, 1861-1870.
Installment I
Installment II
Installment III
The American Civil War, which began with an election and an artillery barrage in South Carolina, had rapidly escalated into a tremendous conflict of North against South. While the Union loyalists generally fared worse than the Confederacy in northern Virginia, the main field of combat, in 1862 the Federals made huge gains in the West while managing to force the hitherto victorious rebel Army of Northern Virginia to withdraw from its invasion of Maryland. More defeats followed in the next months at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, such that the Southern general Robert E. Lee felt as though he could invade the North successfully; in this, he was disastrously mistaken, for the Union Army of the Potomac, under the command of George G. Meade, won a decisive four-day victory at Gettysburg that saw Lee’s army nearly destroyed; at nearly the same time, Ulysses S. Grant was making a name for himself in the West with the capture of Vicksburg, such that the Union seized control of the entire length of the Mississippi. The next year and a half saw victory after victory for the Federals, who capitalized brilliantly on Gettysburg and Vicksburg; Meade wintered in 1863 close to Richmond itself, while Grant seized Atlanta early the next year. The Confederacy was in the end completely broken by the fall of 1864, but the conventional warfare of the earlier years simply gave way to asymmetric conflicts, in which the Confederate secret society the Ku Klux Klan refused to give up and conducted terrorist operations all throughout the Deep South. These only intensified when some rebels made their way to the Plains and fought with the Native Americans in the series of bloody Indian Wars. America was by no means a healed society in 1870, but the real threat was past and the enemy now was merely a huge nuisance.
That victory in 1864 forced Napoleon III to give up his Mexican adventure early; looking for new fields on which to do diplomatic and military battle, he turned back to Europe. Realizing his tacit support of Prussia against Austria in 1866 was a mistake that allowed half of Germany to be united, Napoleon used his considerable forces and influence to organize the southern German states into their own confederation, and then in saving Austria from the Hungarian Revolt of 1866-7 brought the Habsburgs down on his side. Spain’s Carlist Wars, in the meantime, ended unexpectedly with the adoption of a Liberal King, Maximilian I, former emperor-to-be of Mexico. Realizing the great power that Napoleon had assembled, in 1869 the North German Confederacy and the Russian Empire joined with the hitherto-isolated United Kingdom and with the revanchist Italy in the treaty of Frankfurt. The two alliance systems divided most of Europe between them, but nobody was quite willing to provide a spark for the powder keg yet. But in the next decade, it would come…all too soon.
Thunder Road, 1870-1874.
The creation of two grand alliances did not force a war in Europe immediately as had, for example, the Coalitions against Napoleon and the Diplomatic Revolution of the 1750s. For one thing, none of the antagonists save perhaps France and the North German Confederacy were prepared for war. France itself was most interested in consolidating Habsburg - and thus, allied - control of Spain, after all. Von Bismarck and the North Germans, for their part, were still engaged in the process of integrating the other members of the Confederacy with Prussia. And both sides had their eyes on extending influence into the Balkans. Russia was extremely interested in significantly weakening Austria and claiming a measure of hegemony, and Gladstone's government was worried enough about the new French-led alliance to be willing to give way on several key points. Besides, psychologically many of the contestants weren't nearly as ready as they wished to be. So instead of an immediate all-out conflict, the world was treated to a display of alliance-building and proxy fighting that slowly built up to the inevitable main event.
While all attempts to get the Netherlands onto one side or the other failed miserably (although the House of Oranje was fairly sympathetic to their relatives the Hohenzollerns, and despite Willem III's "sale" of Luxemburg to the NGC, the Netherlands was unwilling to enter a new war over much of anything, preferring to instead strengthen its colonial position), Belgium became a battleground between French and British adherents. Napoleon III in particular wanted to use Belgium as a route to invade the Rhineland, skirting the Eifel range and hopefully landing on the flank of those ominous North German armies. Britain, obviously, wanted to keep Belgium out of the war and thus aligned itself with the neutralist parties in the government (chief among which was King Leopold II himself). An internal palace feud began, between Leopold and his Habsburg queen Marie Henriette, who became the advocate for not only the rest of her family in Austria but for her son in law Maximiliano I of Spain as well. With Belgium thus largely immobilized between the two parties, it reverted to de facto neutrality, and looked to do so for the duration of any conflict barring exogenous shock.
Portugal, formally Britain's ally, was largely overawed by its neighbor Spain; with the Carlist Wars finally ended and Franco-Spanish troops crawling the countryside exterminating both Bourbon and Carlist adherents, Luis I - who was more interested in patronizing the sciences anyway, and who had a stagnating domestic situation to boot - declined the efforts of the Earl of Granville (who became Gladstone's foreign secretary after the death of Clarendon in 1871) to bring him and Portugal into the wider Frankfurt Treaty alliance system. His Prime Minister, the duke of Saldanha, had other plans, but they were cut short by yet another coup d'etat (in which the Historic Party once more took office). To the east, Maximiliano I was busily consolidating his control of Spain with significant help from a French expeditionary force under Marshal F.A. Bazaine. Juan Prim, previously de facto generalissimo in charge of Spain, took control of the Spanish military itself and systematically began training it up by fighting partisans while receiving weapons and tutelage from the French troops. Spain's army rapidly began recovering from its previously disastrous state, though it was by no means capable of facing one of the Great Powers' militaries on even terms yet. In the civil field, Maximiliano had to work to force the Cortes to accept him as a monarch. The ability to speak Spanish certainly helped, as did the old ties his dynasty had within Spain; by and large, though, what opposition did arise was crushed by the 'stick' of the French and reformed Spanish armies. Maximiliano, as his carrot, naturally expanded the rights of the Cortes and initiated some centralizing reforms to gain the allegiance of part of the republican segment of the Cortes itself. He nearly alienated many of his Conservative supporters by abolishing slavery in the entire Empire in 1872, but enough support on both sides of the aisle had materialized in the metropoly by that point to make it a relatively safe move. The hot-button items of universal manhood suffrage and separation of church and state had to wait, though.
The Italians constantly made noise over the status of the Patrimony of St. Peter, as well as Savoy and Nice; Prime Minister Giovanni Lanza, while devoting much of his time to social reforms and economic tinkering, repeatedly locked horns with the French on the issue of the contested areas. Giuseppe Garibaldi, in particular, caused an international incident when he marched on Rome a second time in 1871 with an army of twenty thousand volunteers and was repulsed by the French garrison at Vetralla. Lanza was forced to disavow Garibaldi's actions, after which his government fell and was replaced by Urbano Rattazzi and the Democrats. Rattazzi continued to honor the Frankfurt alliance mostly due to the overwhelming Italian support for it, but grew to depend mostly on personal force of will rather than support for his political positions. His death in 1873 allowed Lanza's successor at the head of the Liberal-Conservatives, Marco Minghetti, to recapture the premiership. In the military sphere, Italy was able to modernize its army and navy with Prussian and British help respectively, but was still largely inferior to the Austrians and French. The memory of Custozza had not yet been erased.
Von Bismarck's North German Confederation continued to consolidate itself and integrate its constituent militaries. The Prussian Greater General Staff now had effective control over the entire NGC army. Due to the perceived imminence of a war with France and Austria, in 1870 von Bismarck passed a law in the Reichstag that reorganized the military recruitment areas for the Landwehr and essentially eliminated the independence of the constituent states' armies. Prussia fortunately outnumbered the other parts of the NGC by a vast margin, but the Hannoverians and Saxons were both not particularly happy at the new arrangement, and hinted that there would be political ramifications. Von Bismarck wasn't too worried about this, though, because Prussia's supermajority in the Reichstag was basically unassailable, and his Reptile Fund ensured that the Reichstag didn't break down on political party lines either. Von Bismarck's neighbor to the south, though, was briefly embroiled in a major squabble. Von der Pfordten, previously chancellor, died in 1871 and Ludwig II attempted to use his status as President of the Confederacy to reign without a prime minister, provoking major dissent within the SGC. Forced to call in the French military, Ludwig had to fight against a significant portion of his own army in a two-month civil war that the North Germans very nearly took advantage of (but decided not to due to the ongoing reorganization of the army). When the dust settled, the Bavarian King was unchallenged at the top of the South German Confederacy, but the only reason he was head and shoulders above everyone else was because he was sitting on French bayonets. The Bavarian and Württemberger armies were gutted and the South German capacity to fight a war was seriously diminished. Napoleon III was not amused.
Austria, spurred by the sobering prospect of a war with every single nation on its border save the South German Confederacy, was desperately attempting to shove whatever military reforms that could be done into place. Kaiser Franz Josef largely left matters to his minster-president, Eduard Taaffe, who with the assistance of the Inspector General of the Army, Erzherzog Albrecht, and Field Marshal Gabriel Radic, streamlined the Austrian army and introduced the French chassepot to the entire force. Civil reforms were left largely by the wayside; Hungary was to expect nothing good in return for its failed uprising in 1866-7, for example, and Germanization was renewed with vigor in those lands.
But it was in the Ottoman Empire and its Balkan neighbors that the catalyst for any war would appear. Serbia and Greece both plotted against the Ottomans, conspiring to seize wide swathes of Macedonia, completely out of touch with what they could reasonably control (as all parvenu states are wont to do); Russia, too, conspired to force the Ottomans from Europe and create a Bulgarian state instead, while advancing greatly in the Caucasus. Gorchakov had already secured international recognition for the abrogation of the parts of the Paris Peace that had barred Russia from having a Black Sea Fleet; said Fleet was rapidly being built up again, although it was nowhere near as powerful as its predecessor had been. Diplomatically, the situation in the Balkans was essentially 'everybody against the Turk' as of 1869, for both the Austrian ally of Serbia and the Russians were intent on expansion. Austria, however, believed that Russia was the greater threat, and rightfully so; the Ottomans could be plundered later if Austria managed to weather the coming storm. Their assistance against the Russians, however, would be invaluable. French and Austrian agents at the Porte began wooing Sultan Abdulaziz; since Franco-Turkish relations were already excellent, it wasn't a particularly difficult task. Abdulaziz was extremely worried about a British attack, though, and asked for concrete French support; after prevarication, he instead got a large Spanish expeditionary force under the former Carlist Ramon Cabrera. Franco-Spanish naval support was also promised. In 1873, with the new Spanish troops and promises of more aid (and the knowledge that either way, he'd have to face the Russians), the Sultan was sufficiently emboldened to join the Freiburg system by signing separate alliance agreements with France, Spain, and Austria. He also nearly began a Great War early by removing Carol I as prince of the Danubean Principalities; the Hohenzollerns were infuriated, and von Bismarck threatened war, but ultimately backed down due to Russian insistences of unreadiness. Sultan Abdulaziz kept the Principalities under the ‘regency’ of Manolache Epureanu, infuriating many of the Western Powers who ultimately decided to wait until they were better prepared.
Prince Milan Obrenovic of Serbia was now caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he could simply go along with his friends the Austrians. His other choice was to ride the tide of public opinion into an alliance with Russia and nebulous promises of aid. The classic 'damned if you do...' was difficult to face: either prepare for a major storm of Serbian public opinion by abandoning the struggle against the Ottomans, or prepare for a major storm of Turkish and Habsburg troops that the Russians might not arrive in time to defeat. The prince, who only came of age in 1872, prevaricated and attempted to hold off on a conflict, but events were moving too fast for him to control the situation. The 1874 harvest was terrible in Anatolia, and revolts sprang up all over the Ottoman heartland. As troops were redeployed in an attempt to contain the uprisings, the Serbian government itself began to push for the prince to change his policies, and the Russian agents seeded throughout the country didn't help by whipping up anti-Ottoman riots. Those same Russian agents, hard at work in Bulgaria, saw their efforts bear fruit in 1874; in June of that year, the Bulgarian secret societies, led by Lyuben Karavelov and Vasil Levski, among others, initiated uprisings in Sofia, Stara Zagora, and Plovdiv. The Sultan ordered Osman Pasha, one of the best remaining Turkish generals, to crush the uprisings. Faced with the imminent destruction of the best chance Serbia had to successfully fight the Ottomans, and with the knowledge that he had perhaps two weeks before Austrian troops redeployed from elsewhere, the prince took the plunge. An alliance was concluded with Russia on the fifth of July, and two days later the Serbians declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Russia responded four days after that by declaring the Paris Peace null and void and launching its own attack on the Ottoman Empire; this coincided with a similar declaration from the megalomaniacal state of Montenegro, led by its prince, Nikola I. Within the next month, the rest of Europe was once more at general war.
Honorable Intentions, 1874-1875.
Since it was a series of Serbian actions what started the Great European War, it will be with Serbia we will continue. As of 7 July 1874, Serbia had roughly thirty thousand men under arms in any effective way, of whom only half of which were of reasonable skill. Prince Milan himself took official control of the army, leading ten thousand men in securing the Ottoman frontier posts at Nish. Easily successful due to Osman Pasha's preoccupation elsewhere, the Serbians then planned a descent upon the great fortress of Vidin on the Danube. The prince with a reinforced army of fifteen thousand marched on Vidin and invested it, aided by the lack of a significant Ottoman garrison. That, of course, was when the Turkish army arrived. Osman Pasha had forty thousand men suppressing Bulgarians but detached half of them to annihilate the Serbians. Osman relieved Vidin in mid-July without a significant battle, and pursued Milan's retreating army towards Bor. At Bor on the twenty-first of July, Osman's army repelled a counterattack by the Serbians and then responded in kind, easily driving Milan's troops off the field with heavy casualties.
But the Ottoman commander was not going to simply continue on and annihilate the Serbians. He would entrust that mission to the Austrians, while he himself moved to defend the Danube crossings from the incoming Russian armies. Already by the end of July the Russians had assisted in the declaration of independence by the Danubian Principalities and shoved out the few Ottomans that were there; in early August, the main Russian army, of nearly 200,000 and under the overall command of the velikiy knyaz, Nicholas, began probing along the Danube for possible crossing points. The overall plan was to cross on the inner Danube so as to avoid the strong Turkish fortifications along the Black Sea coast. A large reinforcing Turkish army of some 125,000 was inbound to Varna, thence to the Danube delta, under Abdul Kerim, while the Spanish army under Cabrera of 75,000 men was heading for the western Danube but would take some time to get there. Nicholas instructed the Russian van, under Josef Gourko, to surprise Osman Pasha's inferior force and force a crossing a few miles east of Vidin, and mask Ottoman troops in preparation for an attack on that fortress, left partly unmanned due to the troop needs elsewhere along the river. Gourko charged across the river, which was surprisingly easy to bridge (the Russian river navy making short work of the nearby Turkish gunboats, with the Austrian river navy nowhere in sight) and immediately began to deploy to the east to screen the landing site. Most of the Russian army had finished crossing by the fifteenth of August and began to move on Vidin, which was besieged under the leadership of the great Russian engineer Todleben, hero of the defense of Sevastopol in the last war.
Meanwhile, Osman had collected many of the troops that were tied down by the Bulgarian uprisings - which had been partly crushed - and was holding the other great fortress of the inner Danube, Plevna. His inability to break through Gourko's screen consigned his troops to the fortress, which he began fortifying intensively with the aid of the engineer, Tewfik Pasha. The Ottomans were forced to wait until Cabrera arrived from Anatolia to deal with the Russians, while Abdul Kerim was engaged with a Russian flank guard of 75,000 under the command of the knyaz Aleksandr Imeretinsky in the lower Danube. With Todleben's assistance, Vidin was seized after two weeks, by which time the Spanish were rapidly approaching. To the west, Prince Milan had used his respite well and managed to reconstitute the Serbian army after the disaster of Bor; with ten thousand men, he effected a linkup with the Russians just before Vidin fell and then advanced purposefully on Nish, which had been recaptured by Osman Pasha previously. He managed to capture that city, but was shortly halted by the arrival of the Spanish army. Cabrera sent out a flank guard to hold off the Serbians and then vigorously began to oppose the numerically superior Russians around Montana. Lethargy on the part of the top Russian commanders halted operations for a few weeks, but in September Nicholas began probing once again, finally launching a major attack at Banitsa on September 16 that drew in much of the Spanish army. In the battle of encounter at Banitsa, the Spanish managed to gain ascendancy in the town of Banitsa itself but to the north a Russian detachment under the rising star Mikhail Skobelev was able to secure the main high ground in the area, pushing several batteries of artillery to the top and firing down on the Spanish in the town. With this key advantage, the Russians had the battle in hand, although Cabrera forced them to fight for every last inch of the town until night fell, under which cover the Spanish withdrew.
With the Spanish line disrupted at Banitsa, the velikiy knyaz began pouring troops into the weak point. Skobelev led the assault, which began pushing into the foothills of the Stara Planina towards Slivnitsa and Sofia. As the Spanish lines lengthened, Cabrera was forced to shift his troops further east to cover the Shipka Pass and the flanks of Osman Pasha's stronghold at Plevna. This allowed the Russians and Serbians to effect another linkup, this time with the Montenegrins, who were fresh from a small victory over an Ottoman detachment at Vucji Do. When winter forced a relative slowdown in campaigning, the Russo-Serbo-Montenegrin troops had managed to cut off Ottoman Bosnia and Novi Pazar, but advancement into Bulgaria itself was still rather limited. One notes immediately, however, the conspicuous absence of Austrian troops; this is because, outside of a few bombardments of Belgrade, the Austrians were in no position to intervene in the Balkans. They were fighting desperately elsewhere.
The Austrian situation, however, must be passed over for the main event: the German campaign. The North German Confederacy's brilliantly organized military was essentially in a race against those of France and Austria. At stake was Austria itself, reliant on arms from France to provide their technological edge (such as it was) against her enemies; if the South German Confederacy could be severed, it would mean doom for the Austrians and probably a cessation of hostilities in favor of the Frankfurt Allies. Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the Greater General Staff, had been mobilizing before the Serbians had even officially allied with Russia, and was ready to launch an attack after two days of war. King Ludwig's shadow of an army in South Germany was woefully inadequate to fight the modern and overwhelmingly powerful North German one. Prinz Friedrich Karl, in command of the NGC First Army of 70,000, advanced purposefully into Franconia, crossing the Main at Würzburg on the 23rd of July and was immediately engaged with the majority of the South German field army. Neither side had a numerical advantage as the morning turned into afternoon, but at around three o'clock North German reinforcements began to arrive, appearing on the northern flank of the South German troops on the high ground near the village of Grombühl. The southerners were encircled and overwhelmed, nearly annihilated, with the remnants retreating disparately towards Munich. At Erlangen a few days later they were caught by a flying column of North German cavalry and rounded up. The North German army advanced, victorious, south towards Munich. King Ludwig fled to Paris, and the governments of Baden and Württemberg declared the South German Confederacy dissolved, but remained at war with North Germany and in alliance with France. Even Bavaria wasn't a total loss, as Gabriel Radic's troops began swarming across the Inn and occupied Munich itself. The destruction of the ramshackle South German state within four weeks was certainly bad news, but the situation on the whole wasn't all that terrible, save for the minor fact that Austria and France were now completely cut off from one another. Further French munitions would have to rely on either reopening southern Germany or blasting a new route through northern Italy.
The remainder of the German front began to open up as the summer wore on and was still fairly fluid even as winter set in. Despite the Austrian seizure of Munich, the North Germans were able to ride their momentum to the Swiss border and force Württemberg to heel. Baden, however, remained at war, bolstered by the main French army under Patrice MacMahon himself. MacMahon and the North German First and Second Armies (under Karl Friedrich and Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm, respectively) finally clashed at the inconclusive Battle of Pforzheim in October after two months of cautious maneuvering and minor engagements; the North Germans, despite the French advantage of the chassepot and their new 'secret weapon', the mitrailleuse, had far superior artillery. MacMahon had made the error of abandoning much of hist artillery in favor of the new weapons, which proved effective technically but which were tactically outranged by the Krupp guns from the Rhine foundries. The Germans managed to drive the Franco-Baden army off the field, but with such severe casualties that Karl Friedrich elected not to pursue. In the east, the Third Army of Karl von Steinmetz opposed the Austrians around Munich, slowly pushing the Habsburgs out of the city and across the Isar, culminating in a savage fight on the River Isen in September during which the Austrians initially drove back the German assault across the river, but failed to check a drive by a flanking corps that had been thrown across the Isen the previous day. Von Steinmetz was however the victim of a major Austrian counterattack that drove him back across the Isar and made Munich an urban battleground, a retreat only halted by the arrival of Landwehr troops. Bohemia and Silesia were largely quiescent. The Austrians faced off against Leonhard von Blumenthal's Fifth Army, which conducted relatively lax operations but which held about 100,000 Austrians in Bohemia and Moravia, tying them down and preventing them from joining other operations.
In Galicia, the Russian juggernaut under the velikiy knyaz Michael, with some 150,000 men, opposed a slightly smaller number of Austrians under Erzherzog Albrecht. The Austrians weren't quite ready in time and thus lost Przemysl fairly early before Albrecht arrived to prevent the Russians from seizing Lemberg. The wily Albrecht declined to trap most of his troops inside Lemberg and instead kept them mobile, preventing the Russians from safely besieging the fortress-city. Operations largely stalled here for the remainder of the year, until Michael retreated to Przemysl and detached troops to irrupt through the Danubian Principalities into Austrian Transylvania. Agents were already hard at work on inciting a Magyar revolt, though this had not yet borne fruit in 1874.
Italy was the final major front, and what a front it was. Prime Minister Minghetti was suddenly threatened with major French and Austrian invasions on his northern front. The heart of Italy's industrial region was seriously threatened from the start, for Napoleon III had dispatched Auguste Ducrot with 150,000 men through the Alpine passes into Lombardy while Austrian Field Marshal Franz Kuhn launched his own attack into Venetia. Garibaldi returned from retirement to hastily gather a volunteer army while the Italian regular army, commanded by Alfonso la Marmora, attempted to stand against a numerically and technologically superior French force. La Marmora decided to go on the offensive to try to drive the French back enough to allow him to deal with the Austrians; his attempt, which resulted in the Battle of Vigone, at which Ducrot's mitrailleuses and chassepots shredded the onrushing Italian infantry. Forced to fall back in disarray, the Italians evacuated Turin and sent the government to Milan. All attempts to conquer Rome itself, mounted by Garibaldi, were once more repelled despite real support by the Italian army. Francois Canrobert, the able French veteran of the Crimean War, was able to keep his hold on the Patrimony of St. Peter with relative ease. And finally, the Italian mobilization allowed Raffaele Cadorna, the most competent of the Italian generals, to oppose Kuhn in Venetia beginning in September, although he could only hold the Austrians to the gain of Venetia itself, failing to reclaim Venice or indeed anything beyond the Mincio.
Judging from the performance of the Directory in the War of the Second Coalition before Bonaparte appeared on the scene, it might be salvageable; Massena, for one, seems like a good and bloodthirsty pawn in the hands of others, who could temporarily rescue the Republic. Certainly his performance in Switzerland in late 1799 is a good indicator of that. But the question of the war's resolution, as well as that of the resolution of the political situation in France, is more intractable. If Sieyes can pull of his version of 18 Brumaire correctly (he was the one who originally started it after all), he might become First Consul instead of Bonaparte. I think that Bernadotte, however, will take this particular opportunity to hijack the coup and put himself at the head of the government. While certainly no Napoleon, he's very much competent; look at his governance in Sweden for that. At the same time, he wasn't megalomaniacal or anything. No 'star' for Bernadotte. I could envision him seizing control of 18 Brumaire, albeit not with the same flair Bonaparte did, then turning around and cutting a deal with the Coalition, maybe in exchange for some territory but more probably instead having to give up the republics in Italy and Switzerland.
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oh my no
