ABSTRACT
When riding home from the battlefield of Königgrätz, an aide-de-camp said to Bismarck: ‘Your Excellency, now you are a great man. If the crown prince had arrived too late, you would be the greatest villain.’1 It was the turning point when Bismarck ceased to be a gambler living precariously and became the towering, overwhelming figure that dominated Germany and Europe for the next twenty-five years. Talking to the Hungarian exile Count SeherrThoss a few days after the battle he said: ‘…they took me for a Junker, a reactionary…with the king they denounced me as a secret democrat…this fight has cost me my nervous strength, my vitality! But I have beaten them all! all!’ and with splendid scorn he, ‘the mighty one’, thumped the table.2
