*Ironically the general staff, who viewed Bismarck as a meddler, sarcastically referred to “civilians in cuirassiers' tunics,” a reference to Bismarck's habit of dressing in uniform, especially after 1870. Gall, 366.

Quoted in Gall, 204. The very vividness of this remark aroused much criticism at the time. Von Treitscke, hardly a liberal, wrote his brother-in-law, “You know how passionately I love Prussia, but when I hear so shallow a country squire as this Bismarck bragging about the ‘iron and blood' with which he intends to subdue Germany, the meanness of it seems to me to be exceeded only by the absurdity” (Gall, 206). And even Bismarck's ally von Roon complained of “witty sallies” that did their cause little good.