It was known that the latter were collecting all their strength in Bohemia, and King William, who had General von Moltke, the greatest soldier of his time, for his Chief of the Staff, or principal counsellor in affairs of war, resolved to make a dash into this province before its Austrian defenders knew where they were, and smite them, as David did the Philistines, hip and thigh. Accordingly, he divided the forces of his kingdom into three main armies, each composed of several Army Corps. The command of the First, or centre, Army, numbering about 93,000, was entrusted to the King’s nephew, Prince Frederick Charles, called by his soldiers the “Red Prince,” from the scarlet uniform of the Zieten Hussars which he generally wore; the Second, or left-hand Army, totalling 100,000 men, was given to the King’s high-souled and chivalrous son, the Crown Prince, Queen Victoria’s son-in-law; while the Third, or right-hand host, called of the Elbe, fell to General Herwarth von Bittenfeld, who fought throughout the campaign with a courage worthy of “Hereward, the last of the English.” But these three huge armies did not invade Bohemia in one overwhelming mass. Moltke, the great “battle-thinker,” the “Silent One in Seven Languages,” as his friends fondly called him, knew a trick worth two of that. His maxim was, “march separately, strike combined”; and yet it behoved him to keep the Austrians in perfect ignorance of where he meant to strike. The Crown Prince, on the left, started with his army from Silesia; the Red Prince set out from Lusatia, while Herwarth’s point of departure was Thuringia.