The war had brought forward many heroes, and several great commanders: Grant, Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson--the name he earned, some say (for there is another version of the story), because once, when hardly pressed, he said his men would stand like a stone wall--Stuart, the Southern cavalry raider; Sheridan, a cavalry leader, hardly inferior to Seidlitz or Murat; Sherman, Johnson, Hooker, and many more. Some of them were recurring types--Grant, silent as Moltke, and as tenacious and prescient; Robert Lee, the patriot soldier, who thought only of his country, a man of duty like Wellington; Jackson, who might have been a Puritan Cromwellian, praying and fighting by turns, a Charles Gordon in his absolute trust in Divine help, an Ironsides in his eagerness to smite the foe. The rank and file comprised all classes of the community--artisans, handicraftsmen, scientists--and not the least remarkable features in the war were its engineering achievements: miles of road made in a single night, bridges built, forests removed, extensive entrenchments thrown up as if by magic when the order was given. The “Seven Weeks’ War,” as it has been styled by its historian, Colonel H. M. Hozier, was the first of the short, sharp, and decisive conflicts which are to be the rule in modern campaigns. It was between the Prussians and the Austrians, and it was fought for the future supremacy in the great empire of Germany. Before it no one knew how marvellously the Prussians had improved in the science and practice of war; how admirably their troops were trained, how splendidly armed, and with weapons of the newest invention. Still less was it expected that untried Prussian leaders would develop such unexpectedly superior generalship. From first to last this rapidly successful war was a surprise. It was carried into the enemy’s country with extreme boldness and celerity; the young soldiers of Prussia, under grey-haired but mostly inexperienced officers, soon established a marked superiority over Austrian veterans who had served in many hard-fought campaigns. It was proved in the earliest engagements that the possession of the needle-gun, the breech-loading rifle long carried by a portion of the Prussian army, but never hitherto used, put the Austrians, with their muzzle-loaders and their traditional belief in the bayonet, on very unequal terms. In the fight Austrian soldiers could not stand before the Prussians at all. Then the Prussian generals always out-manœuvred the Austrian; they largely used a system of flanking attack, of turning the enemy’s position at one end or side of it, while he was occupied and engaged by another attack on the front.