“It is impossible to conclude peace. Has there been a battle? I order that in case nothing else is left you commence a retreat in the best possible order.”
Under such pressure Benedek rallied his army around Jicin, Horitz, Königgrätz, and Sadowa. There on July and he gave desperate battle to the Prussians. This is known as the battle of Königgrätz by the Austrians and Germans, and by the French and English as the battle of Sadowa. It meant a complete defeat of the Austrians and an end of the Austro-Prussian war.
Perhaps the best brief graphic account of the prevailing critical condition of the European imbroglio may be gathered from the correspondence of the contemporary historian John Motley, then American Ambassador to Vienna.
In a letter dated April 23, he writes from Vienna to his daughter Lily:
“P. S. April 24, (to quote from his letter) “Prussia has replied. The note was given in yesterday at 2 p. m. Prussia will disarm in principle au fur et a mesure as Austria disarms.
“Now will come a puzzling problem in Rule of Three, Query: Austria not having armed at all, how much disarming, will be required of Prussia to equal the promised disarming of Austria?”[1]
“The boy who answers that deserves to have a double headed eagle of the first class tied around his neck and I wish that he may get it.
“I have been ponderously chaffing on this subject, my dear child, because I have been boring myself, and the United States State Department with dreary despatches on this dreary Schleswig Holsteinismus once a week this three months: and really I have not put down in the foregoing pages all that I know or anybody knows on the subject. I have felt all along that there would be war, I still feel so. Everybody else says there will be peace. Nobody doubts that Prussia will get the duchies, however. To resume the- ↑ That the Austrian army was unprepared for a war at this time was well-known to everyone and that the accusation of her mobilizing was false was an open secret. Count Mensdorff then Minister of Foreign Affairs published his memoirs in the Neues Wiener Uageblat in 1872 and mentioned there that he personally urged the Emperor to grant all the demands of Prussia and to cede Venice to Italy because the Austrian army was in such a position then that it was not “Schlagfertig”.
