The new Austrian army undertook its
revenge too soon and was defeated in 1809; but the Prussian endeavour
continued and bore fruit, after the French disasters in Russia of 1812,
in the national rising in which Prussia, supported by Russia and Austria
and assisted by the British operations in the Peninsula, overthrew the
French Empire in 1814.
After the definitive peace, deferred by the hundred days, but finally
forced upon France on the field of Waterloo, the Prussian Government
continued to foster the school of war which it had founded in the period
of humiliation. Prussian officers trained in that school tried to learn
the lessons of the long period of war which they had passed through.
What they discovered was that war between nations, as distinct from war
between dynasties or royal houses, was a struggle for existence in which
each adversary risked everything and in which success was to be expected
only from the complete prostration of the enemy. In the long run, they
said to themselves, the only defence consists in striking your adversary
to the ground. That being the case, a nation must go into war, if war
should become inevitable, with the maximum force which it can possibly
produce, represented by its whole manhood of military age, thoroughly
trained, organised, and equipped.
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