COUNT VON MOLTKE.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 836, 13 July 1871, Page 3

COUNT VON MOLTKE.

If Count Bismarck may boast of ■ being, par excellence, the statesman of our day, Count Moltke may claim tbe title of the first living strategist. He 13 8 native of Gnewitz, in Mecklenburg, and was born on the 25th of October, 1800 ; so that he has just celebrated his seventieth birthday at Versailles. He is not a Prussian by extraction, but a Dane; and is it remarkable that just a century ago his same was well known in London as the then Count Moltke accompanied King Christian on his visit to England in 1768, when he made the celebrated mot which had been so often put down to others, to the effect that " St. James's Palace might be all very well for the King of England, but it was not a place in which to put a Christian." The present Count was brought up in Holstein, where his father had an estate; and it was among the Danes that he first acquired those military tastes which he afterwards turned against them in the war of 1866. At twelve years of age he was sent to the Land Cadet Academy at Copenhagen, and at twenty-two obtained a commission in the Prussian army. He was first stationed at Frankfort, where he found friends by whose liberality—his father's property taring been lost—he was sent to Berlin to study modern languages and the more technical part of his profession. Employed next in the direction of a School of Division, we find Mm attached to a commission for making military surveys in Silesia and the Duchy of Posen. After attaining the rank of captain he passed four jeare in Asiatic and European Turkey. ihoae he turned to good account by footing himself to the military surwriting a book on the subject embodying his experience. He Bnfed tbe Sultan Mahmoud in several Ta js, and instructed him in the art of tot with such satisfactory results that to him are attributed several great improvements in the organisation of «e Turkish army. By the Sultan he *w commissioned to prepare plans of wna, Schumla, Silistria, and other Pisces on the Danube ; and this comAsion led to his publication of a somewhat celebrated historical work, Jjichbears his name—"The EussoMish Expedition, 1828-29." He «Boborea part in the campaign in tyria, which, the Turks undertook in 1836 against Mehemet Ali, Viceroy of jj&ypt, and his adopted son, Ibrahim j»sb.a. Returning from the east in 'B4O, he was made major, and in the «aoe year married the Fraulein Von M of Holstein. In 1815 he was dominated an aide-de-camp to Prince tienry, of Prussia, uncle of the present ,n g- In 1848 he was sent to Magdefg as the chief of the general staff ot ««corps, and thenceforth his promoJ« was moat rapid. In 1850 he behft J eut enant-colonel, full colonel Is,™ 8 allowing year, major-general in '«&<>, and in 1859 lieutenant-general ■ yre recently he has attained the rank tL and in October last, on of Metz—we believe S»,N7oth birthday-he was created Von Moltke."