The Road to Vienna
July 1866 · Bismarck, after Prussia's victory at Königgrätz has left the road to Vienna open
The Austrian army has been broken in an afternoon and the road to Vienna is open. Nothing is between the army and the enemy capital.
The King wants to go. So do the generals. There is a triumph waiting at the end of that road, and territory, and the sight of an emperor signing whatever is put in front of him. Every man in the room has spent four weeks being shot at for this exact moment, and they are owed it.
The minister is arguing against all of them, alone, and he is not arguing that it would be wrong. He is arguing that a humiliated Austria is a country that spends the next thirty years looking for the chance to do it back, and that in about four years he is going to need Austria to sit still while he fights somebody else.
He wants the war stopped now, this week, with no annexation and no parade. The King has accused him of trying to rob the army of its reward.
Take the road to Vienna
Stop the war now, take nothingOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Bismarck got his way, but barely: he argued for days, threatened to resign, wept in front of the King, and by his own later account considered throwing himself out of a fourth-floor window. Prussia annexed nothing from Austria. Four years later, when Prussia fought France, Austria stayed out of it, and the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles in 1871. This is the same man who edited a telegram to provoke that war, and who would later ban the Socialist Party and then build the world's first welfare state to undercut it. Restraint and provocation were the same instrument in his hands, chosen by what the situation was worth.
The philosophers weigh in
Take Vienna"He is calculating that a spared enemy stays grateful. I have watched cities make that bet. The strong do what they can, and the merciful are remembered as the ones who could have and didn't."
Stop now"Anger is the one appetite that presents itself as justice. Every man in that room wanted Vienna and each of them had a reason ready. He was the only one who wanted something four years out."