After the family had moved to Holstein, where his father failed to make a success of an agricultural undertaking for which he seems to have lacked fitness, young Moltke entered the Royal Danish Military Academy as a cadet, and there passed his lieutenant’s examination with distinction; but he sought and found a commission under the Prussian eagle.  He entered the eighth grenadiers at Frankfort-on-the-Oder.  A year later, in 1823, he was sent to what is now called the War Academy in Berlin.  Only by the closest economy and by some outside work, partly literary, as we shall see, he managed to get along with his exceedingly small officer’s pay.  He distinguished himself however so much that he became, successively, a teacher at the Division School and an active military geological surveyor, and finally was taken into the General Staff of the Army.  Becoming a first lieutenant in 1832, a captain in 1835, ahead of many of his comrades, he served exclusively in strategical positions.  During the four years, 1835-39, he, with some comrades, was in the Turkish dominions for the purpose of organizing and drilling the Turkish Army.  He witnessed, as an active participant, the Turkish defeat by the insurgent Egyptians at Nisib on the Euphrates, which was brought about by the indolent obstinacy of the Turkish commander-in-chief.  Like Xenophon, Moltke retreated toward and reached the Black Sea.  At Constantinople he obtained honorable dismissal from the Sultan.  After his return to Prussia he became chief of the General Staff of the Fourth Army Corps.  In 1841 he married Mary Burt, a young relative who was partly of English extraction.  The union developed into an unusually happy married life, in spite of, or partly because of, their great difference in age.

[Illustration:  MOLTKE ANTON VON WERNER]

His wife, by whom he had no issue, lived to see the beginning of his great achievements and fame, but died in 1868, before his proudest triumph.  Various commands led him to Italy, Spain, England, and Russia as adjutant of Prussian princes.  In 1858 he was appointed chief of the General Staff of the Prussian Army—­the institution which he shaped into that great strategical instrument through which were made possible, from a military point of view, the glorious successes of the three wars—­1864, 1866, 1870-71—­and which has become the model of all similar organizations the world over.

Side by side with the overtowering political achievement of Bismarck and the more congenial life work of Roon, the minister of war, Moltke’s service to his country and his king stands unchallenged in historical significance.  He has indelibly inscribed his name on the tablets of history as one of the world’s greatest strategists.  But he did not lay down his work until extreme old age; in 1888, as he so simply put it in his request for relief from duty, he resigned his office, because he “could no more mount a horse.”  He, however, still remained president of the Commission of National Defense and his last speech in the German Reichstag, of which he had been a continuous member since its establishment, he delivered on May 14, 1890.  He died on April 24, 1891.  The nation felt that one of its great heroes had passed away.