Helmuth Carl Bernhard Moltke

MOLTKE, HELMUTH CARL BERNHARD, COUNT VON (1800-189I), Prussian field marshal, for thirty years chief of the staff of the Prussian army, the greatest strategist of the latter half of the 19th century, and the creator of the modern method of directing armies in the field, was born on Oct. 26, 180o, at Parchim, Mecklenburg, of a German family of ancient nobility. His father in 1805 settled in Holstein and became a Danish sub ject, but about the same time was impoverished by the burning of his country house and the plunder by the French of his town house in Lubeck, where his wife and children were. Young Moltke therefore grew up in straitened circumstances. At the age of eleven he was sent to the cadet school at Copenhagen, and entered the Danish army in 1818. But at twenty-one he resolved to enter the Prussian service, in spite of the loss of seniority, and he became second lieutenant in the 8th Infantry Regiment stationed at Frankfort-on-Oder. At twenty-three he entered the war academy, doing brilliantly in the final examination in 1826. He then foi a year had charge of a cadet school at Frankf ort-on Oder, after which he was for three years employed on the military survey in Silesia and Posen. In 1833 he was transferred to the general staff in. Berlin. His tastes inclined him to literature, to historical study and to travel. He published a short romance, The Two Friends (1827); an essay, Holland and Belgium in their Mutual Relations . . . (1831) ; and An Account of the Internal Circumstances and Social Conditions of Poland (1832). In 1832 he contracted to translate Gibbon's Decline and Fall into German, for which he was to receive f75, his object being to earn the money to buy a horse. In eighteen months he had finished nine volumes out of twelve, but the publisher failed to produce the book and Moltke never received more than £25.

Turkish Experience.—He had already travelled in south Germany and northern Italy, and in 1835 on his promotion as captain he obtained six months' leave to travel in south-eastern Europe. After a short stay in Constantinople' he entered the Turkish service, being duly authorized to do so from Berlin. He spent two years at Constantinople,% learned Turkish, and sur veyed for the sultan the city of Constantinople, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. He travelled in the sultan's retinue through Bulgaria and Rumelia, and made many other journeys on both sides of the Strait. In 1838 he was sent as adviser to the Turkish general commanding in Armenia, who was to carry on a cam paign against Mehemet Ali of Egypt. He rode several thousand miles in the course of his journeys, navigating the dangerous rapids of the Euphrates, and visiting and mapping many districts where no European traveller had been since Xenophon. In 1839

the army moved south to meet the Egyptians, but upon the ap proach of the enemy the general became more attentive to the prophecies of the mullahs than to the advice of the Prussian captain. Moltke resigned his post of staff officer, and took charge of the artillery, which, in the ensuing battle of Nisib, was the last portion of the Turkish army to run away.

Moltke with infinite hardship made his way back

to the Black Sea, and thence to Constantinople. His patron Sultan Mahmud was dead; so he returned to Berlin where he arrived, broken in health, in December 1839. When he left Berlin in 1834 he had already "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword." When he returned it was with a mind expanded by a rare ex perience, and with a character doubly tempered and annealed. While away, he had been a constant letter-writer to his mother and sisters, and he now revised and published his letters as Letters on Conditions and Events in Turkey in the Years 1835 to 1839. No other book gives so deep an insight into the char acter of the Turkish Empire, and no other book of travels better deserves to be regarded as a German classic.

One of his sisters had married an English widower named Burt, who had settled in Holstein. Her stepdaughter, Mary Burt, had read the traveller's letters, and when he came home as a wooer was quickly won. The marriage took place in 1841, though there were no children, and Moltke's love-letters and letters to his wife are among the most valuable materials for his biography. On his return in 1840 Moltke had been appointed to the staff of the 4th army corps, stationed at Berlin; he was promoted major on his wedding day. He published his maps of Constantinople, of the Bosporus and of the Dardanelles, and, jointly with other German travellers, a new map of Asia Minor and a memoir on the geography of that country, as well as a number of periodical essays on various factors in the Eastern Question. His Russo Turkish Campaign in Europe, 1828-29, described in 5845 by Baron von Moltke, Major in the Prussian Staff was recog nized by competent judges as a masterpiece. Moltke at this period became one of the first directors of the Hamburg-Berlin railway, and in 1843 published a review article entitled What Considerations should determine the Choice of the Course of Railways? which reveals a mastery of the technical questions involved in railway construction.