through Southern Germany, under the full conviction that his colleague had obtained a like success to the northward, while the latter had actually been defeated at Amberg, Wurtzburg, and Aschaffenburg, and driven back upon the Rhine, and Moreau only heard of his disaster in time to save his army from destruction by a hurried retreat through the defiles of the Black Forest. As a contrast to this, let us take the campaign of 1866, when the two Prussian armies advanced from separate bases into Bohemia, laying down the lines of the field telegraph as they moved forward, which, being connected by the permanent telegraphic system of Saxony, kept each army in constant communication with the other, and thus enabled them to combine their operations, and at length to unite with decisive effect on the battle-field of Sadowa.
It is just twenty years since, for the first time, the electric telegraph was used in the field, and to the British army belongs the honor of having led the way in its adoption. The trenches and batteries before Sevastopol were traversed and connected by lines of telegraph, and the French soon followed our example and constructed a similar system in their own lines; while later on a cable laid across the Black Sea put the armies in the field in direct communication with Paris and London.
Since that time a regular telegraph corps has been organized in every European army. And the field telegraph was used by the French in Italy in 1859, and in their campaigns against the Kabyles in Algeria; and, in America, both the Federals and Confederates made free use of permanent and temporary lines during the war of secession, the Southern cavalry in particular displaying great daring and enterprise in riding round the flanks of the Federal armies, seizing their telegraph-lines, sending false messages to the Northern generals, and then cutting the line and retiring as rapidly and secretly as they came. It was, however, in the Prussian army, and in the great campaigns of 1864, 1866, and 1870-'71, that military telegraphy attained its greatest development; and, after the experience of these three wars, the Prussian telegraph corps is probably the most efficient in Europe. We have already seen how well it did its work in the campaign of 1866,[1] and in 1870 it established the net-work of wires over the northeast of France, that enabled Moltke, sitting in his bureau at Versailles, to move his armies as accurately and certainly as pieces on a chessboard; while round Paris itself a circle of telegraph-wires that in a moment flashed information of a sortie, and orders for a reënforcement of the threatened point, to every part of the long line of sixty miles, on which the besiegers lay—contributed almost as much toward the
- ↑ During the armistice which preceded the Treaty of Prague in 1866, the Prussians displayed great carelessness about their telegraphic communications, and the troops often tore down a line to light their fires with the telegraph-poles, and tie up their horses with the wire. (See Stoffel, "Rapports Militaires.")
