Neipperg contented himself with a few very weak regiments, which he picked himself, as he did the Generals, with the result that some regiments were ordered up from very long distances, while others, much nearer at hand, were left in their stations.
I flattered myself that the good relations between the General commanding and the Chancellor in charge of provisioning the army would be very profitable, but this good understanding was very quickly broken.
It is true that Neipperg had no more than 14,000 combatant troops under him, but he thought that would suffice, and on the one hand, there was no money to mobilize more regiments, since no demands at all were to be made of the Provinces, the Chancellor, by an unbelievable error, believing that the Provinces could not provision a larger number of troops without ruining themselves; on the other hand, although Count Uhlfeld, in Turkey, assured me that no danger threatened from that quarter, the Ministers were not entirely satisfied that the very recent peace would prove quite stable, and for that reason, and also out of mistrust of the Hungarians themselves, thought it inadvisable to take too many troops away from the Turkish frontier.
The general opinion was that this small force would be a match for the inexperienced Prussian army.
Some of the Ministers made no concealment of their wish to sit down and reach agreement with Prussia at any moment, at the first opportunity that presented itself, whether things in Silesia went well or ill. The hope of defeating Prussia was the more reasonable because we had good grounds for hoping that we could gain the assistance of Saxony and Hanover, and there was still a possibility of getting that of Russia.
The former hope would probably have been realized if the campaign in Silesia had been undertaken at the outset with larger forces, and more caution. But the factors mentioned above made the Ministers lukewarm. My notes on the later campaign in Bavaria will be found in the annexe.
I was beginning to appreciate the mistakes which the Ministry had made in my father’s lifetime; nevertheless, although I made every effort to read the mind of each of them, I yet did not venture to oppose them directly on such important issues, especially since I knew how inexperienced I was. I rather tried to reconcile the differences and to achieve the greatest measure of common agreement possible. I did not always succeed in this –sometimes the opposite – but this was what I tried to bring about in the most important deliberations.
But these difficulties proved insurmountable because, under the Constitution as it then stood, each Minister played, as it were, the lord and master in the department under his charge, used his power to thwart any opposition and followed only the course which seemed good to him or agreed with his preconceived opinion.
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