THE FIELD TELEGEAPH. 
143 
did its work in the campaign of 1866,* and in 1870 it estab- 
lished the network of wires over the north-east 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 information of a sortie, and orders for a rein- 
forcement of the threatened point, to every part of the long 
line of sixty miles, on which the besiegers lay — contributed 
almost as much towards the reduction of the vast fortress as 
the circle of steel and iron, of batteries, earthworks, and 
redoubts, which, without the connecting link of the telegraph 
wire, could not have been maintained for a single month. On 
their side the French displayed no less energy. The regular 
telegraph corps was shut up in Metz or lost at Sedan ; but a 
fresh corps was organized for the armies of the Republic, and 
at Paris the telegraph lines linked together the enceinte, the 
forts and outworks, and the head-quarters of General Trochu. 
But it was in the second siege of the capital that the French 
telegraph corps obtained its greatest success. During the 
fighting in the streets of Paris, in May 1871, the moment a 
barricade was taken, a telegraph station was established in 
a neighbouring house, and when another post was carried, the 
telegraph corps would again move forward with the troops, and 
thus MacMahon was able to watch every turn of the fight, and 
provide for every contingency, in a way that otherwise would 
have been utterly impossible. For ourselves, we have had no 
European war since 1854 ; but our armies have carried the 
telegraph with them into India and China, and through the 
ravines and passes of Abyssinia ; and now the “ talking wire ” 
stretches from Cape Coast Castle through the bush, across the 
Prah into the heart of Western Africa, hanging on the trees, 
with here and there a few poles, the whole having been erected 
by Fantee labourers, under the direction of a handful of Royal 
Engineers. 
The object of the field telegraph is to keep the head-quarters 
of an army in communication with its several corps, and at the 
same time with the general telegraph system of the country. 
In the Prussian army, when the telegraph corps was re-organised 
after the war of 1866, it was formed into two divisions — the 
Field Telegraph Division and the Etappen Division — with a 
view to the more efficient performance of these two services. 
* During the armistice which preceded the treaty of Prague in 1866, the 
Prussians displayed great carelessness about their telegraphic communi- 
cations, 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 Stofiel, Rapports 
Militaires . 
