The views here expressed were put into practice, and proved to be sound, on the battlefields of 1866. The battle of Nachod, in which the Crown Prince's left column, emerging from the mountains, defeated the Austrian corps which tried to prevent its debouching, illustrated the leading ideas of Moltke's essay. The position was on the crest of a long slope, up which the Austrians attacked. The Prussian troops were handled in small columns, which deployed to resist by steady and rapid fire at short ranges the advance of the Austrian masses. After the war, a younger officer of the general staff, Major, afterwards Lieutenant-General Kühne, published a critical history of these early battles of the Crown Prince; and it is worth noting that he found the chief cause of success on the actual battlefields to have lain in the thoroughness with which the men had been taught to handle the needle-gun, and in the judgment with which the officers applied the small column for manoeuvre and the deployed formations for firing. At Königgrätz itself was illustrated the view that the attack would find its advantage in broken or covered ground, for the decisive blow was prepared essentially by Fransecky's hard fighting in the wood of Maslowed. After the war of 1870, the Prussian staff was for many years engaged upon its history, which was not complete until 1881. During this period the main business of military criticism was the sifting of that war, with a view to the improvement of theory, in other words to the better management of future wars. It has always been thought remarkable that this criticism should have been undertaken by the Germans themselves. The bulk of this work also was done by the general staff, in the shape of unofficial publications by members of that body. Between 1870 and 1875 appeared the studies of Verdy du Vernois in _The Art of Command_, works which have exercised the profoundest influence on the military literature of our time, and which recall the efforts of Scharnhorst to teach, not a series of disconnected sciences, but a doctrine of the conduct of war.[8] Verdy's studies were based on his work in the historical department of the staff, where he was engaged on the records of both the great campaigns. In 1882 appeared the essay on _Strategy_ of Blume, who had prepared for it by a strategical history, published in 1872, of the campaign of 1870 from the battle of Sedan onwards. In 1883 was published the brilliant popular work of Von der Goltz, _The Nation in Arms_, also the outcome of extensive historical studies.[9] All these writers were members of the Prussian general staff.