To the distant observer it seemed that France would gain an easy victory, and once again occupy Berlin.  Besides her supposed military forces, she still had a great military prestige.  Prussia had done nothing of signal importance for forty years except to fight the duel with Austria; but France had done the same, and had signally conquered at Solferino.  Yet during forty years Prussia had been organizing her armies on the plan which Scharnhorst had furnished, and had four hundred and fifty thousand men under arms,—­not on paper, but really ready for the field, including a superb cavalry force.  The combat was to be one of material forces, guided by science.

I have said that only a pretext was needed to begin hostilities.  This pretext on the part of the French was that their ambassador to Berlin, Benedetti, was reported to have been insulted by the king.  He was not insulted.  The king simply refused to have further parley with an arrogant ambassador, and referred him to his government,—­which was the proper thing to do.  On this bit of scandal the French politicians—­the people who led the masses—­lashed themselves into fury, and demanded immediate war.  Napoleon could not resist the popular pressure, and war was proclaimed.  The arrogant demand of Napoleon, through his ambassador Benedetti, that the king of Prussia should agree never to permit his relative, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, to accept the vacant throne of Spain, to which he had been elected by the provisional government of that country, was the occasion of King William’s curt reception of the French envoy; for this was an insulting demand, not to be endured.  It was no affair of Napoleon, especially since the prince had already declined the throne at the request of the king of Prussia, as the head of the Hohenzollern family.  But the French nation generally, the Catholic Church party working through the Empress Eugenie, and, above all, the excitable Parisians, goaded by the orators and the Press, saw the possibility of an extension of the Roman empire of Charles V., under the control of Prussia; and Napoleon was driven to the fatal course, first, of making the absurd demand, and then—­in spite of a wholesome irresolution, born of his ignorance concerning his own military forces—­of resenting its declinature with war.

In two weeks the German forces were mobilized, and the colossal organization, in three great armies, all directed by Moltke as chief of staff to the commander-in-chief, the still vigorous old man who ruled and governed at Berlin, were on their way to the seat of war.  At Mayence, the king in person, on the 2d of August, 1870, assumed command of the united German armies; and in one month from that date Prance was prostrate at his feet.