Did Moltke himself also take the field? No, not at once; for it meanwhile sufficed this great military chess-player, this mathematical planner of victory, to sit quietly among his maps and papers at the offices of the Grand General Staff in Berlin, with his hand on the telegraph wire, and direct the movements of the three armies of invasion. Take the following description that was penned by an English witness of the crossing of the frontier by the army of the Red Prince:--“It was here” (at a toll-house gate) “that Prince Frederick Charles took his stand to watch his troops march over the border. He had hardly arrived there before he gave the necessary orders, and in a few moments the Uhlans, or Lancers, who formed the advance guard of the regiments, were over the frontier. Then followed the infantry. As the leading ranks of each battalion arrived at the first point on the road from which they caught sight of the Austrian colours that showed the frontier, they raised a cheer, which was quickly caught up by those in the rear, and repeated again and again till, when the men came up to the toll-house and saw their soldier-prince standing on the border line, it swelled into a rapturous roar of delight, which only ceased to be replaced by a martial song that was caught up by each battalion as it poured into Bohemia. The chief himself stood calm and collected; but he gazed proudly on the passing sections, and never did an army cross an enemy’s frontier better equipped, better cared for, or with a higher courage than that which marched out of Saxony that day.” Over the picturesque hills of Saxony, over the Giant Mountains into the fertile plains of Bohemia, swiftly sped the three superbly-organised armies like huge and shining serpents; and ever nearer did they converge on the point which, with mathematical accuracy, had been selected as the place where they would have to coil and deliver their fatal sting of fire. Hard did the Austrians try to block the path of the triune hosts and crush them in detail; but the terribly destructive needle-gun, with the forceful lance of the lunging Uhlan and the circling sabre of the ponderous Cuirassier, ever cleared the way, and a series of preliminary triumphs marked the progress of the three armies towards junction and final victory. By the 29th the Red Prince had reached Gitschin, the objective point of the invasion, while his cousin the Crown Prince lay at Königinhof, on the left, a long day’s march distant. Meanwhile the Austrians had all retired under the shelter of the guns of Königgrätz, a strongly fortressed town on the left bank of the Upper Elbe, there to take their final stand, with their backs, as ’twere, to the wall.