A CRUISING VISIT TO SOME GERMAN RATTLE-FIELDS, 
455 
DISCUSSION, 
1 
Chairman —Before returning our thanks to Mr. Bigelow for his lecture, I 
may mention that he would be very glad to answer any questions you may like to 
ask him about his trip. With reference to what he said about the making of the 
Prussian army, I remember an old Prussian general officer telling me that it 
struck him at the time as an enormous revolution that after Jena, when the new 
army had to be imbued with the spirit of the nation, the Prussian officer for the 
first time addressed his soldiers in the second person instead of in the third 
person. They had been in the habit of addressing them in the third person, 
that being the most contemptuous form that could be imagined. He said 
it may now appear a trifling thing, but that it was one sign of an enormous 
social revolution. Now if any officer, or anybody else, has any remarks to make, 
we shall be very glad to hear him. 
Major-General Maurice —I think we can hardly do other than congratulate 
ourselves on having asked Mr. Bigelow to lecture to us after hearing his very 
interesting account of what can be done witli the canoe, and the extent to which, 
by its help, history may be studied in the places where events occurred. The 
only point upon which I am inclined to say a few words is the remarkable 
evidence which Mr. Bigelow has given us of the completeness with which the 
memory of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau has passed away in the very places in 
which the one was born and the other died. I cannot help thinking that that 
forgetfulness of the men was closely connected with the fact that all the great 
work that they had done for Germany had been allowed to perish. It is easily 
shown that that had happened. In 1859, when the Trench were fighting against 
the Austrians and driving them back, Prussia had a much keener sense of the 
general interests of Germany than she had had during the period which preceded 
Jena, when her policy was about as disgraceful as it could possibly be, so that 
that great disaster really seemed a just judgment upon her for her fickleness. She 
had become sufficiently conscious of the mistakes of the earlier time to be in 
1859 most anxious to move to the support of Austria for the purpose of resisting 
what threatened to be a new Trench invasion of Germany. As soon as the Trench 
troops, passing out of Italy, should enter Austrian territory, Prussia determined to 
treat it as an attack upon her as much as upon Austria. Therefore, she attempted 
to take advantage of the mode of organising her army, which had been created by 
the °Teat men of whom Mr. Poultney Bigelow has been speaking. She tried to 
mobilise for war. But in order that the work which has been done by great men 
in the past shall be of value to those who come after them, there must be other 
men to carry it on and to sustain it. That had not been the case in Prussia. 
Only the forms of the system remained. There was no life in it. The whole 
thing completely collapsed. Prussia tried to get her army together and it abso¬ 
lutely broke down in her hands. Moreover, that was not the first time that that 
experience had come to her since the deaths of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and Stein. 
In 1848 the revolutionists had tried, by a distinctly popular movement, to antici¬ 
pate that union of Germany which has taken place in our time. They offered the 
Crown of Germany to the King of Prussia as the best representative they could 
get. Then also Prussia had made an attempt to take advantage of all that work 
of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Stein and Bernstein. The thing so completely collapsed 
in her hands that when Austria advanced her troops to the Prussian frontiers she 
was able to dictate one of the most disgraceful peaces that Prussia ever made. 
The King of Prussia was obliged to surrender the Imperial Crown, which he was 
ready to accept from the “ Beds,” and to sign what was called “ The political 
capitulation of Olmutz,” 
