Eighteen days after the victory of Königgrätz the Prussian hosts were in line on the historic Marchfeld whence the spires of Vienna could be dimly seen through the heat-haze. The soldiers were eager for the storm of the famous lines of Florisdorf and King Wilhelm was keen to enter the Austrian capital. But now the practical wisdom of Bismarck stepped in and his arguments for moderation prevailed. The peace which ended the Seven Weeks' War revolutionised the face of Germany. Austria accepted her utter exile from Germany, recognised the dissolution of the old Bund, and consented to non-participation in the new North German Confederation of which Prussia was to have the unquestioned military and diplomatic leadership. Prussia annexed Hanover, Electoral Hesse, Nassau, Sleswig and Holstein, Frankfort-on-Main, and portions of Hesse-Darmstadt and Bavaria. Her territorial acquisitions amounted to over 6500 square miles with a population exceeding 4,000,000, and the states with which she had been in conflict paid as war indemnity sums reaching nearly to £10,000,000 sterling. In a material sense, it had not been a bad seven weeks for Prussia; in a sense other than material, she had profited incalculably more. She was now, in fact as in name, one of the "Great Powers" of Europe. The nation realised at length what manner of man this Bismarck was and what it owed to him. When the inner history of the period comes to be written, it will be recognised that at no time of his extraordinary career did Bismarck prove himself a greater statesman than during the five days of armistice in July 1866, when he fought his diplomatic Königgrätz in the Castle of Nikolsburg and assuaged the wounds of the Austrian defeat by terms the moderation of which went far to obliterate the memory of the rancour of the recent strife.