became a Danish subject, 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 Lübeck, where his wife and children were. Young Moltke therefore grew up in straitened circumstances. At the age of nine he was sent as a boarder to Hohenfelde in Holstein, and at the age of eleven to the cadet school at Copenhagen, being destined for the Danish army and court. In 1818 he became a page to the king of Denmark and second lieutenant in a Danish infantry regiment. But at twenty-one he resolved to enter the Prussian service, in spite of the loss of seniority. He passed the necessary examination with credit, and became second lieutenant in the 8th Infantry Regiment stationed at Frankfort-on-Oder. At twenty-three, after much less than the regulation term of service, he was allowed to enter the general war school, now the war academy, where he studied the full three years and passed in 1826 a brilliant final examination. He then for a year had charge of a cadet school at Frankfort-on-Oder, after which he was for three years employed on the military survey in Silesia and Posen. In 1832 he was seconded for service on the general staff at Berlin, to which in 1833 on promotion to first lieutenant he was transferred. He was at this time regarded as a brilliant officer by his superiors, and among them by Prince William, then a lieutenant-general, afterwards king and emperor. He was well received at court and in the best society of Berlin. His tastes inclined him to literature, to historical study and to travel. In 1827 he had published a short romance, The Two Friends. In 1831 it was followed by an essay entitled Holland and Belgium in their Mutual Relations, from their Separation under Philip II. to their Reunion under William I., in which were displayed the author’s interest in the political issues of the day, and his extensive historical reading. In 1832 appeared An Account of the Internal Circumstances and Social Conditions of Poland, a second study of a burning question based both on reading and on personal observation of Polish life and character. In 1832 he contracted to translate Gibbon’s Decline and Fall into German, for which he was to receive £75, 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, so that the chief reward of his labour was the historical knowledge which he acquired. He had already found opportunities to travel 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 was requested by the sultan to enter the Turkish service, and being duly authorized from Berlin he accepted the offer. He remained two years at Constantinople, learned Turkish and surveyed 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 the troops in Armenia, who was to carry on a campaign against Mehemet Ali of Egypt. During the summer he made extensive reconnaissances and surveys, riding 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 preceded him since Xenophon. In 1839 the army moved south to meet the Egyptians, but upon the approach of the enemy the general became more attentive to the prophecies of the mollahs than to the advice of the Prussian captain. Moltke resigned his post of staff officer and took charge of the artillery, which therefore, in the ensuing battle of Nezib or Nisib, was the last portion of the Turkish army to run away. The Turks were well beaten and their army dispersed to the four winds. Moltke with infinite hardship made his way back to the Black Sea, and thence to Constantinople. His patron Sultan Mahmoud 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 experience, 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 character 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 step-daughter, 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, when Mary was just turned sixteen. It was a very happy union, 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. The fruits of his Eastern travels were by no means exhausted. 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. In 1845 appeared The Russo-Turkish Campaign in Europe, 1828–29, described in 1845 by Baron von Moltke, Major in the Prussian Staff, a volume which was recognized by competent judges as a masterpiece of military history and criticism. Moltke at this period was much occupied with the development of railways. He was 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 the construction and working of railway lines.
In 1845 Moltke was appointed personal adjutant to Prince Henry of Prussia, a Roman Catholic who lived at Rome. He thus had the opportunity of a long stay in the Eternal City, with no more than nominal duties to perform. It was a life which he and his wife much enjoyed, and he spent much of his leisure in a survey, of which the result was a splendid map of Rome, published at Berlin in 1852. In 1846 Prince Henry died, and Moltke was then appointed to the staff of the 8th army corps at Coblenz. In 1848, after a brief return to the great general staff at Berlin, he became chief of the staff of the 4th army corps, of which the headquarters were then at Magdeburg, where he remained seven years, during which he rose to lieutenant-colonel (1850), and colonel (1851). In 1855 he was appointed first adjutant to Prince Frederick William (afterwards crown prince and emperor), whom he accompanied to England on his betrothal and marriage, as well as to Paris and to St Petersburg to the coronation of Alexander II. of Russia. Prince Frederick William was in command of a regiment stationed at Breslau, and there as his adjutant Moltke remained for a year, becoming major-general in 1856. On the 23rd of October 1857, owing to the serious illness of King Frederick William IV., Prince William became prince regent. Six days later the regent selected Moltke for the then vacant post of chief of the general staff of the army. The appointment was made definitive in January 1858. Moltke’s posthumously published military works disclose a remarkable activity, beginning in 1857, devoted to the adaptation of strategical and tactical methods to changes in armament and in means of communication, to the training of staff officers in accordance with the methods thus worked out, to the perfection of the arrangements for the mobilization of the army, and to the study of European politics in connexion with the plans for campaigns which might become necessary. In 1859 came the war in Italy, which occasioned the mobilization of the Prussian army, and as a consequence the reorganization of that army, by which its numerical strength was nearly doubled. The reorganization was the work not of Moltke but of the king, and of Roon, minister of war; but Moltke watched the Italian campaign closely, and wrote a history of it, published in 1862, and attributed on the title-page to the historical division of the Prussian
