ABSTRACT

A personality of genius taking hold of the Army at the juncture and given a free hand, might conceivably have worked changes that would have affected the whole future, not of the German Army alone but of Germany itself. Moltke’s successor, Waldersee was not a man of genius, though he had energy and intelligence of a very high order. The von Waldersees were also a left-handed offshoot of this great family and had over more than a century distinguished themselves both in the civilian and in the military branches of the Prussian service. Alfred Count von Waldersee was born in 1832 as the son of a Prussian general, his mother also being a general’s daughter. The fact is that he was popular, and that in a high degree, so that we cannot but suppose that despite the technical identity of the two, Waldersee the diarist was a rather different figure from Waldersee the officer, charmer and man of the world.