304 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



throuo-h Southern Germany, under the full conviction that his col- 

 league had obtained a like success to the northward, while the latter 

 had actually been defeated at Amberg, Wurtzburg, and Aschaffen- 

 burg, and driven back upon the Khine, 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 

 telegraj)h as they moved forward, which, being connected by the per- 

 manent 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 tele- 

 graph was used in the field, and to the British army belongs the 

 honor of having led the way in its adoption. The trenches and bat- 

 teries 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 enter- 

 prise 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 Prus- 

 sian telegraph corps is probably the most efficient in Europe. We 

 have already seen how well it did its work in the campaign of 1866,^ 

 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 chess- 

 board ; while round Paris itself a circle of telegraph-wires — that in a 

 moment flashed inform ation*of a sortie, and orders for a reenforcement 

 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.— (&e Stoffel, " Rapports MiUtairesy) 



