Moltke's Grand Plan

After spring arrived, the smoke of war once again thickened across the Eastern European battlefield. After a winter of preparations, the situation had become vastly different.

The Berlin Government had organized civilians to build large numbers of fortified castles along the border, restricting the movements of the Cossack cavalry. To plunder wealth and goods, they now had to storm those fortresses by force.

The Cossack cavalry's fighting strength was built on profit. Once the civilians were prepared, looting became increasingly difficult. More often than not, the casualties they suffered were wildly disproportionate to their gains, dealing a blow to the Cossacks' enthusiasm.

The fighting strength unleashed when one took the initiative was completely different from that of being forced into action.

Although the Cossack cavalry was still being deployed, its achievements were growing smaller and smaller. Most of the time, they merely destroyed farmland and infrastructure; the soldiers were unwilling to gnaw on hard bones.

This was no longer the Middle Ages. As long as they had money in their pockets, there were plenty of places to buy grain. Damage to farmland in the border regions alone was still something the Berlin Government could bear.

In a sense, William I even had to thank the Tsarist Government. It was precisely these ruthless Russian methods that had left the Poles with no choice but to depend on them.

The decline in the Cossack cavalry's destructive power did not mean the Tsarist Government's scorched-earth strategy had failed.

Before war, humanity was fragile. To escape the flames of war, many people from the border regions fled inland with their families in tow, and quite a few areas turned into no-man's lands.

It was not that the Berlin Government had failed to stop them; the problem was that it simply could not. Streams of