Not long after our arrival at Creisau, early in 1887, I repeated my suggestion. In reply to my request that he would write an account of the Campaign of 1870--1, he said: "You have the official history of the war. That contains everything. I admit," he added, "that it is too full of detail for the general type of readers, and far too technical. An abridgment must be made some day." I asked him whether he would allow me to lay the work on his table, and next morning he began the narrative contained in this volume, and comparing it as he went on with the official history, carried it through to the end.
His purpose was to give a concise account of the war. But, while keeping this in view, he involuntarily--as was unavoidable in his position--regarded the undertaking from his own standpoint as Chief of the General Staff, and marshalled results so as to agree as a whole with the plan of campaign which was known only to the higher military authorities. Thus this work, which was undertaken in all simplicity of purpose, as a popular history, is practically from beginning to end the expression of a private opinion of the war by the Field-Marshal himself.
The Appendix: "On a pretended Council of War in the Wars of William I. of Prussia," was written in 1881. In a book by Fedor von Koppen, "Männer und Thaten, vaterländische Balladen" (_Men and Deeds: Patriotic Songs_), which the poet presented to the Field-Marshal, there is a poem entitled, "_A German Council of War at Versailles_" (with a historical note appended), describing an incident which never occurred, and which, under the conditions by which the relations of the Chief of the Staff to his Majesty were regulated, never could have occurred. To preclude any such mistakes for the future, and to settle once and for all the truth as to the much-discussed question of the Council of War, the Field-Marshal wrote this paper, to which he added a description of his personal experience of the battle of Königgrätz. It is this narrative which, shortly after the writer's death, was published in the _Allgemeine Zeitung_ of Munich, in the somewhat abridged and altered form in which the Field-Marshal had placed it at the disposal of Professor von Treitscke, the well-known historian.