The railroad problem

In 1859, France and Austria went to war in Italy. As the troops marched along the roads, they waved cheerfully to the trains which ran on the railways alongside. It was war in an old tradition, fought for limited objectives by small professional marching armies, with battles which began in the morning and ended in the evening. The American Civil War, which began two years later, was a new kind of war coloured by ideology, fought for unconditional surrender, between great conscript armies rushed across vast distances by rail to fight battles of ever-increasing length over ever-extending spaces.

The elder Moltke, Chief of the Prussian and then of the German Military Staff†, did not think much of the qualities of the generalship exhibited at the beginning of the Civil War (he spoke of the opposing armies as ‘mobs of armed men chasing each other round the country-side’). However, he was quick to draw the lessons of this conflict in which the only way of avoiding stalemate was to ‘get there first with the most’ and the method of achieving this was the railway.