The Danish army at the start of…
February 1864 CE
The Danish army at the start of the war consists of about thirty-eight thousand men in four divisions.
The 8th Brigade consists of the 9th and 20th Regiments (approximately sixteen hundred soldiers each), mainly soldiers from the middle and west and north of Jutland.
About thirty-six thousand men defend the Dannevirke, a job that it will be said would have needed fifty thousand men to do properly.
The 1st Regiment had been changed from a battalion to a regiment on December 1, 1863.
The Prussian army has thirty-seven battalions, twenty-nine squadrons and one hundred and ten guns, approximately thirty-eight thousand four hundred men.
The Austrian army has twenty battalions, ten squadrons and forty-eight guns, approximately twenty-three thousand men.
During the war, the Prussian army will be strengthened with sixty-four guns and twenty thousand men.
The supreme commander for the Prussian-Austrian army is Field Marshal Friedrich Graf von Wrangel.
Prussian and Austrian troops cross into Schleswig on February 1, 1864, against the resistance of the Federal Assembly of the German Confederation, and war becomes inevitable.
The Austrians attack towards the refortified Dannevirke frontally, while the Prussian forces strike the Danish fortifications at Mysunde (on the Schlei coast of Schwansen east of Schleswig town), trying to bypass the Danevirke by crossing the frozen Schlei inlet, but in six hours cannot take the Danish positions, and retreat.