Few soldiers' lots have been so tragic as that of General Benedek, whom the irresistible tide of popular favour bore—against his own will—to the pinnacle of military honours, only to hurl him down from there into disgrace and ignominy. Much has been said and written as to the amount of pressure put upon Benedek to accept the command of the North army; but to all but a few the entire truth can never be known. So much seems clear, however, that, like Gyulay in 1859, he had doubts of his own powers, and in accepting the critical post was actuated not by ambitious motives, but only by the purest loyalty to his sovereign.

The question as to how much of his failure is attributable to his own want of generalship and how much to faulty army organisation is another of those problems which will never be decided. Many people are of opinion that Königgrätz was lost on the day when the needle-gun model offered to Austria was rejected. “We have clever people in Vienna too,” is said to have been the contemptuous form in which the rejection was couched. The extraordinary prejudice which seems to have reigned against the new arm, despite its success in 1864, is explicable only by ingrained Austrian conservatism. Among objections brought forward was waste of ammunition; but chiefly the injury to the morale of the troops, by the discouragement of bayonet attacks—that pride of the Austrian army.