General Character of The War in Europe
The triumph of Prussia was in a great measure due to its fuller application of principles of tactics and discipline universally recognized though less universally enforced. The other powers reorganised their forces after the war, not so much on the Prussian model as on the basis of a stricter application of known general principles. Prussia, moreover, was far ahead of all the other continental powers in administration, and over Austria, in particular, its advantage in this matter was almost decisive. Added to this was the personal ascendancy of Frederick, as opposed to generals who were responsible for their men to their individual sovereigns.
The war, like other conflicts of the time, featured an extraordinary disparity between the end and the means. The political schemes to be executed by the French and other armies were as grandiose as any of modern times. Their execution, under the then conditions of time and space, invariably fell short of expectations, and the history of the war proves, as that of the Seven Years' War was to prove, that the small standing army of the 18th century could conquer by degrees, but could not deliver a decisive blow. Frederick alone, with a definite end and proportionate means to achieve it, succeeded completely. Even less was to be expected when the armies were composed of allied contingents, sent to the war each for a different object. The allied national armies of 1813 (at the Battle of Leipzig) co-operated loyally, for they had much at stake and worked for a common object. Those of 1741 represented the divergent private interests of the several dynasties, and achieved nothing.
Read more about this topic: War Of The Austrian Succession
Famous quotes containing the words general, character, war and/or europe:
“The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, “fixed.””
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting—the war and the revolution—and the character of the accused—revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power—you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“The Cold War began with the division of Europe. It can only end when Europe is whole.”
—George Bush (b. 1924)