190 In that age of unstable alliances and easy wars it was certain that a conviction shared by so many states would sooner or later lead to action. It was equally certain that, while Frederick was king, Prussia would strike back. Hence we may regard with some indifference nice balancings of moral judgment upon the great fact of 1756, when Frederick suddenly made war upon Austria and treated Saxony with almost greater violence. It seems idle to maintain that because Austria had yielded up Silesia by treaty she was debarred for ever from retaliating upon Frederick in the fashion which he had set. Who would apply such a rule to the problems of the present? If it be lawful, in our own day, for France to hope to recover Alsace and Lorraine, or for Spain to hope to recover Gibraltar, it is not easy to understand why, in 1756, Maria Theresa might not lawfully hope to reverse the verdict of 1742 and 1745. And if she and her neighbours contemplated something more than a recovery of lands actually lost, if they sought to reduce the King of Prussia to the harmless level of a Margrave of Brandenburg, who can be indignant or even surprised? A new coalition against Frederick would be merely the Austrian answer to his own riddle, “If I have an advantage, am I to use it or not?”
THE EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARIA THERESA IN THE VIENNA HOFFBURG.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF A. F. CZIHAKS NACHFLG, VIENNA.
But if, as seems undeniable, Austria and her neighbours had good grounds for hoping to attack Prussia, and if, as Frederick had reason to believe, the danger was becoming imminent in 1756, what could be more futile than the statement that none the less he was not justified in striking the first blow? It191 is true that for reasons of current politics the Austrian Chancellor, Kaunitz, schemed with success to shape events so as to make Prussia seem the aggressor, and that he thus established the conditions under which Austria could claim the fulfilment of a treaty of defensive alliance. At a distance of a century and a half, however, such subtleties can be appraised at their true value. Though in 1756 war emerges from as dense a cloud of diplomacy as ever befogged the path of European history, our generation may regard the Third Silesian War as the natural result of the original aggression of Frederick and of the abiding interests of other Powers.
Those interests, however, demand a brief explanation, for they determined the time and the form of a war which at some time and in some form was inevitable from the very moment at which Austria and Prussia laid down their arms at Dresden. In an age when the true course of states was steered by kings and statesmen of whom some were lazy, some self-seeking, some timid, some honestly mistaken in their designs, it was not to be expected that many should, like Prussia, make straight for a definite goal. Since the Peace of Utrecht, Europe had lived in an atmosphere of general uncertainty. Nations formed countless short-lived comradeships for the pursuit of objects often transient. It was almost impossible to forecast who, if war broke out, would be ranged on one side or the other, and hardly less difficult to forecast the side upon which those who had entered the war as allies of one of the combatants would be found at the end of it. What might, however, be192 anticipated with confidence was that few Powers would neglect the chance of profit which war afforded. Walpole’s famous boast, “There are fifty thousand men slain in Europe this year and not one Englishman,” was called forth by his triumph in keeping clear of the War of the Polish Succession, which was not too remote to embroil every other Great Power.
While there was then a tendency for every Power to share in every war as an auxiliary if not as a principal, two alliances had become traditional. Ever since the undue predominance of France first imperilled the liberties of Europe, England had steadily supported Austria against her. And so soon as the Great Elector showed that Prussia might be a serviceable ally, France strove to employ her with a view to the humiliation of Austria. Though only occasionally successful in engaging Prussia, she continued to regard her as a natural ally. Thus each of the maritime and commercial rivals of the West had its liaison with one of the German Land Powers of the East.
More to be reckoned on than these connexions were, however, three great antipathies which the course of history had revealed. The clash of interest between Austria and Prussia seemed destined to distract Germany until one or other proved supreme, and, so long as Maria Theresa confronted Frederick, it would be made harsher by a duel between the sovereigns. Russia, while Elizabeth ruled, would go with Austria. The giant State whose westward path had been marked out by Peter193 the Great already discerned in Prussia the athlete braced to dispute the way. Ost-Preussen was always a tempting bait, and long ere this an ambassador at Frederick’s Court reported that the King feared Russia more than his God. None the less Frederick had permitted his sharp tongue to goad the luxurious Czarina into a fury which surpassed that of the Queen whom he had robbed of Silesia. In April, 1756, the Austrian ambassador at St. Petersburg was informed that Russia was ready to co-operate in an immediate attack upon Prussia by sending 80,000 men, and that she would not lay down her arms until Maria Theresa had recovered Silesia and Glatz.
The jealousy of the rival states in Germany and the wrath of the despot who swayed the policy of Russia would count for much in the coming war. Weightier still was the struggle between France and England for the primacy in three continents and on the seas. This great national duel had been begun by William III. and brilliantly continued by Marlborough. During the pacific rule of Walpole, when the two countries were nominally in alliance, England was gaining strength and taking up a position in America and India which her rival could not witness unmoved. The close league formed by France with Spain, the monopolist of the New World, rendered lasting peace with England impossible and even Walpole was forced into war. This war, known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, began with an attack on the Spaniards in 1739, and developed into a world-wide struggle with the French in which194 Dettingen and Fontenoy were incidents. The settlement at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which put an end to it, was obviously a mere breathing-space. In the early fifties hostilities broke out anew between the English and French in India and North America, and it could hardly be doubted that Europe would soon catch fire.
In 1756, therefore, war between France and England had already begun, and war between Frederick and his two Imperial neighbours was imminent. The custom of Europe and the precedent of the former struggle made it in the highest degree unlikely that these wars would be kept apart. What would be the connexion between them? The answer was determined by three accidents. The King of England happened to be Elector of Hanover, the ruling spirit at Vienna happened to be Kaunitz, and the mistress of Louis XV. happened to be Madame de Pompadour.
Hanover, argued George II., will certainly be attacked by the French. It must be defended at all costs. The only possible defenders are Austria, Russia, and Prussia. Austria, the old patron of Hanover, would be preferable. But the Queen has grievances against England and is bent on attacking Prussia. Alliance with her would therefore expose Hanover to the Prussians as well as to the French, and must therefore be regarded as out of the question. Russia and Prussia remained to be considered. Russia actually made a convention to hire out troops for the defence of Hanover. But Russia, the King found, also desired to attack Prussia, and was therefore195 as ineligible an ally as Austria. Only the Prussian alliance remained possible. In January, 1756, by the Convention of Westminster, it was secured.
The Convention of Westminster, by which Frederick bound himself to defend Hanover against attack, helped on the far more difficult task of Kaunitz. This was no less than to reverse the secular policy of France and Austria and to bring Bourbon and Hapsburg into alliance. Kaunitz based his calculations on the assumption that France might help Austria to recover Silesia, but that England never would. This view of the political situation was urged for seven years with great ability by a statesman in whom the Queen reposed a confidence greater than that with which our own Elizabeth honoured Burleigh, and who treated her in return with a haughtiness such as Essex would never have dared to show. Kaunitz, whose life was spent in the endeavour to exalt the power of his mistress, forced her to shut her windows to humour his prejudice against fresh air, and stalked out of her Council when she interrupted him with a question. At another meeting, it is said, she remonstrated with him on his riotous living. He replied that he had come there to discuss her affairs, not his own.
But the great, it is said, are known to the great, and Maria Theresa’s confidence in Kaunitz seemed to be justified when his visionary scheme proved feasible. It was easy to form a league to despoil Prussia. Kaunitz tempted Russia with parts of Poland, Poland with an indemnity in Ost-Preussen, Saxony with Magdeburg, Sweden with Prussian196 Pomerania, the princes of the Empire with the favours which the Emperor alone could bestow. But it required great powers of imagination to conceive that France might quit the beaten track of history, which was at the same time plainly the path of self-interest, in order to assist her hereditary foe in a great land-war at a time when she needed all her strength to meet England upon the seas.
Kaunitz had not only the strength to see this vision, but also the fortune to realise it in fact. The circumstance that favoured him the most was that the Pompadour was now at the height of her influence in France. The mistress of Louis XV. furthered the plan of Kaunitz for selfish reasons, but in the expectation that its result would be the exact reverse of what it was. She desired to keep the peace in Europe in order that she might continue to live quietly at Versailles. The Minister of Marine, moreover, was her friend; the minister who might profit by a land-war was her enemy. She therefore favoured a covenant of neutrality with Austria in the hope that the two wars would thus be kept apart.
The Convention of Westminster, however, made it impossible that the affair should rest here. The fact that Prussia had bound herself to resist a French invasion of Hanover frustrated all Frederick’s efforts to propitiate the Pompadour and to throw dust in the eyes of the French.
“If the ministry of France will consider it well,” wrote Frederick on January 24th, “... it should197 find nothing to say in reason if I undertake such a convention, by which, moreover, I flatter myself that I render an essential service to France, seeing that I shall certainly arrest 50,000 Russians by it, and shall hold in check another 50,000 Austrians at least, who but for that would all have acted against France.”
He further endeavoured to discount his alliance with George II. by turning a sympathetic ear to the French plans for assisting the Young Pretender, and by advising her to strike in Ireland and on the south coast of England at the same time. It was beyond his art, however, to disguise what he had done, and Kaunitz knew how to profit by it.
The labours of the diplomatists were immense, but at last they were successful. On May 1, 1756, by the Treaty of Versailles, both France and Austria undertook for the future to defend the European possessions of the other with 24,000 men. In the war with England, Austria was to remain neutral, but if in the course of it any province of France in Europe were to be attacked by any ally or auxiliary of England, Austria promised by a secret article to provide the stipulated assistance and France offered a similar guarantee. This might be interpreted as binding Austria to join in the war if the French were masters of Hanover and the Prussians marched against them. It thus deprived the Convention of Westminster of half its value, and at the same time threatened to connect the war against England, which France had begun brilliantly at Minorca, with the war against Prussia, for which Elizabeth was clamouring. Negotiations for a still closer union198 between Austria and France were pressed on, and Kaunitz hoped that in 1757 all would be ready.
Too much was, however, in the wind for Frederick’s keen scent to be entirely baffled. Austria, indeed, sincerely desired peace for the present. The published articles of the Treaty of Versailles were innocent. The English ministry disingenuously tried to lull the protector of Hanover into false security by assurances that they could answer for Russia. But the King of Prussia had his own sources of information as well as the most perfect faith in the malevolence of his fellow-men. For three years and a half one Menzel, a clerk in the Saxon Foreign Office, had been furnishing him with copies of the secret state-papers of Augustus. The whole truth about the negotiations against Prussia was not known at Dresden, but enough reached Frederick from this source to impress upon him the desirability of anticipating his foes. So early as June 23, 1756, he sent to General Lehwaldt, in K?nigsberg, three sets of instructions, military, economic, and secret, for dealing with the anticipated Russian invasion, and even for negotiations with a view to peace.
“You know already,” wrote the King, “how I have allied myself with England, and that thereupon the Austrian court, from hatred of my successful convention with England, took the course of allying itself with France. It is true that Russia has concluded a subsidy-treaty with England, but I have every reason to believe that it will be broken by Russia and that she has joined the Austrian party and concerted with her a threatening plan. But all this would not have caused me to move199 if it had not been brought to my notice through many channels and also by the march of Russian and Austrian troops that this concert is directed against myself.”
Frederick probably told the truth to his commander-in-chief in Ost-Preussen. On the same day Sir Andrew Mitchell, the shrewd and honest Scotchman who then represented England at the court of Prussia, had an audience with the King. He reported that, notwithstanding the great number of enemies, the King seemed in no wise disconcerted, and had already given orders everywhere. “In a fortnight’s time he will be ready to act. His troops, as I am informed, are complete, and the artillery in excellent order.”
On the eve of war, then, Frederick’s sword was as sharp as of old and his courage as high. He soon showed that his pen had not lost its cunning. At the end of June he indicted his enemy before the judgment-seat of England. Austria regarded her new connexions, so stated his clever memoir, as the triumvirate of Augustus, Antony, and Lepidus. The three courts, like the three Romans of old, had sacrificed their friends to each other.
“The Empress abandoned England and Holland to the resentment of France, and the court of Versailles sacrificed Prussia to the ambition of the Empress. The latter proposes to imitate the conduct of Augustus, who used the power of his colleagues to aggrandise himself and then overthrew them one by one. The court of Vienna has three designs towards which her present steps are tending—to establish her despotism in the Empire, to ruin the Protestant cause, and to reconquer200 Silesia. She regards the King of Prussia as the great obstacle to her vast designs.”
Thus Frederick claimed to be the champion of the balance of power and of Protestantism, and proposed to solicit not only Denmark and Holland, but even the Turk and the Empire for aid. His appeal to England concluded with the assurance that Prussia was not cast down. “Three things can restore the equilibrium of Europe—a close and intimate connexion between our two courts, earnest efforts to form new alliances and to foil the schemes of the enemy, and boldness to face the greatest dangers.”
A paper of this kind, brilliant, concise, astute, and even eloquent, is worth many thousand lines of the rhymed platitudes by which the author set greater store. We might expect to hear that it was followed at once by a spring at the throat of the enemy. It is true that Kaunitz, who was not yet ready for war, and who wished that if war must come Frederick should be the aggressor, held the Russians back. But he was pressing forward warlike preparations in Bohemia and Moravia, and Frederick was not likely to ignore the advantage of striking swiftly and of waging war outside his own borders. The military men, when they saw the evidence in the King’s hands, were all for action. “Schwerin,” says Carlyle, “much a Cincinnatus since we last saw him, has laid down his plough again, a fervid ‘little Marlborough’ of seventy-two.” He urged the immediate seizure of Saxony, as a base of operations against Bohemia.
Cooler heads, indeed, counselled Frederick to have201 patience. On behalf of England, a Power always singularly dispassionate when the interests of a German ally were at stake, Mitchell urged that many chances of war and politics might swiftly change the face of affairs, and that to attack Austria would give unnecessary provocation to France. The faithful Podewils ventured to spend a summer afternoon at Potsdam in labouring to turn the King from his purpose. In his letter of July 22, 1756, to Eichel, he speaks of the “respectful freedom” with which he begged the King not to drive France and Russia to do what they had no desire to do that year if Austria were not attacked. Let him rather use the ten months’ grace before the next campaign in securing allies within and without the Empire, in trying to reconcile France and England, and in preparing an imposing defence.
“But all this,” says the poor man, “was completely rejected as arising from far too great timidity, and at last I was dismissed coldly enough with the words, ‘Adieu, Monsieur de la timide politique.’” His concluding phrases, however, have in them so much of prophecy that they may be cited here.
“That it was not doubtful that progress and success might at first be brilliant, but that the complication of enemies, at a time when the King was isolated and deprived of all foreign help, which had never happened to him yet, at least in regard to the diversions which had been made in his favour in the two preceding wars, would, perhaps, make him remember one day what I took the respectful liberty of representing to him for the last time.”
202 Such is the literal rendering of the French into which Podewils, who writes the bulk of his letter in a jargon of German, French, and Latin, forces his tortuous German thoughts.
Frederick, indeed, seems already to have passed the stage at which he could be influenced by argument. An agile rather than a deep thinker, he reached at times a point at which calculation became agony and the only remedy was action. Now, as in his earlier adventure, “pressed with many doubts, he wakes the drumming guns that have no doubts.” That a mere Prussian minister should combat his plans seemed to him little short of lèse-majesté. Nor could he be moved by those who were not so tightly bound to the car of Prussia. Mitchell followed Podewils with arguments, and Valori, the French ambassador, followed Mitchell with threats. Frederick’s answer was a series of blunt questions pressed home twice over at Vienna—Have you a treaty with Russia against me? Why are you arming? Will you solemnly declare that you do not intend to attack me this year or next? The final answer was received on August 25, 1756. Next day the Prussians invaded Saxony.
The Seven Years’ War had begun. Needless to say, every movement of the Prussians had been planned out long before. The army was under orders which enforced the most perfect mobility. A hundred supernumeraries had been added to every regiment. On the 13th to 15th August Frederick issued directions that the secret of their destination was to be strictly kept from the troops. They were203 to take with them provisions for nine days, every cavalryman carrying three days’ supply of hay, and every infantryman three days’ supply of bread, while bread for six days was placed in the single baggage-cart allowed to each company. None of this reserve of food was, however, to be broken into save in the utmost need, and no officer of any rank whatever might have table utensils of nobler metal than tin.
A word would set all in swift motion, but the machine had to be arrested until it should be known that the Prussian ultimatum was rejected. Klinggr?ffen, Frederick’s ambassador at Vienna, caused some delay by asking for instructions. On the 24th the King wrote to General Winterfeldt, the most impatient advocate of war: “The cursed courier is not yet here, so I have been compelled to stop the regiments till the 28th. Klinggr?ffen deserves to be made a porter by way of punishment. Such stupid tricks are unpardonable and the prolonged uncertainty is unbearable.” On the 26th, however, after hearing from Vienna, the King was able to set all in motion anew.
“The answer,” he wrote to his brother, the Prince of Prussia, “is impertinent, high, and contemptuous, and as for the assurances that I asked of them, not a word, so that the sword alone can cut this Gordian knot.... At present, we must think only of making war in such a fashion as to deprive our enemies of the desire to break the peace too soon.”
While one royal messenger was bearing this message from Potsdam to Berlin, others were on their204 way to Vienna, to Dresden, and to every division of the Prussian army. Klinggr?ffen was instructed to return a third time to the charge, with the final offer that if the Empress-Queen would declare definitely that she would not attack Frederick that year or the next, the troops now moving should be recalled. More profit was, however, expected from the message to the Saxon Court. King Augustus, or Count Brühl, was to be informed, “with every expression of my affection and of your respect that good breeding can supply,” that Frederick was compelled by the Court of Vienna to enter Saxony with his army in order to pass into Bohemia.
“The estates of the King of Saxony,” continued the royal missive, “will be spared as far as present circumstances allow. My troops will behave there with perfect order and discipline, but I am obliged to take precautions so as not to fall again into the position in which the Saxon Court placed me during the years 1744 and 1745.... I desire nothing more ardently than to behold the happy moment of peace, so that I may prove to this Prince the full extent of my friendship, and place him once more in the tranquil possession of all his estates, against which I have never had any hostile design.”
This declaration was addressed to a ruler who had made no engagements hostile to Frederick, and who now offered to observe perfect neutrality and to allow his troops to pass. A commentary upon it is supplied by a document which was probably drawn up several days earlier, and which was soon to be put in force. By this “instruction” for the administration205 of Saxony during the war, “in order that His Majesty may not leave a highly dangerous enemy in his rear,” the Prussian minister von Borcke is directed to suspend the native administration of the land and to substitute a Prussian Directory of War. The Saxon royal revenue, it is said, amounts to about six million thalers, but Frederick “will be contented with five million, so that the inhabitants may be solaced thereby.” In other respects the order and temperance which distinguished the Prussian Government were to be applied to the subjects of Augustus. Such was Frederick’s plan for the future of Saxony, a would-be neutral, during the war.
The problem which the King set himself was to cripple Austria before Russia or France could come to her assistance. Austria had assembled forces in Moravia and in Bohemia. If Frederick attacked the former the Bohemian army might cut off his retreat. He therefore directed Schwerin to guard Silesia while he himself converted Saxony into a base for the invasion of Bohemia. From the Saxons he expected little or no opposition. He therefore proposed to march in three columns upon Pirna, a fortress situated at the point at which the Elbe bursts through the mountain-wall of Bohemia to enter the fertile plains of Saxony. Then, with a granary and a highway behind him, he would follow the river into Bohemia as far as Melnik, less than twenty miles north of Prague, where it ceases to be navigable. He would thus at the very least have gained a commanding position on the further side of the mountains.
206
“As he does not think that the Austrians will soon be ready to attack him,” wrote Mitchell on August 27th, “he imagines they will throw in a strong garrison into Prague, that [sic] as the winter approaches, he can have good quarters in Bohemia, which will disorder the finances at Vienna and perhaps render that court more reasonable.”
To the ambassador of England Frederick made light of his enterprise and insisted that it would permit him, if necessary, to defend Hanover. But it is difficult not to surmise that he looked for a great campaign. The capture of Prague, the rout of the army of Bohemia, and the seizure of its magazines—all this would be a fitting sequel to the coercion of Saxony. It was not too grave a task for the main host of Prussia.
Even the lesser scheme failed, however, because Augustus, though a weakling, was a man of honour. His army was less than twenty thousand strong, but it sufficed to hold Pirna and to block the highway of the Elbe. On September 9, 1756, Frederick entered Dresden, but Augustus had fled to the army and lay safe in the impregnable rock-fortress of K?nigstein. While the invader was rifling his archives for proofs of a great conspiracy against Prussia, he offered to observe the most benevolent neutrality and begged for an exact statement of what more could be expected from him. He received the answer on September 14th from the lips of Frederick’s favourite, Winterfeldt. It was nothing less than that he should join Prussia in attacking Maria Theresa.
“How can I turn my arms against a Princess who207 has given me no cause for complaint, and to whom, in virtue of an old defensive alliance of which Your Majesty is aware, I ought to furnish 6000 auxiliaries, only that it is doubtful whether the present war is a case of aggression?” Such was the old King’s reply to the Prussian tempter, and he coupled with it renewed assurances of neutrality. Frederick reiterated his demands and expressed regret that he could not extend complaisance further. By no effort of diplomacy could he shake the honourable firmness of Augustus, and it was therefore necessary to gain the highroad into Bohemia by force.
Frederick had surrounded Pirna, but he did not venture to assault it, though Napoleon declared at first sight that there were nine points of attack. It was clear, however, that hunger must soon force the Saxons to move and that their only hope lay in succour from the Austrians. Browne, the Irishman who had proved himself to be one of the Queen’s best generals, therefore led an army northward to the foot of the mountains and was confronted by Frederick in person at Lobositz. On October 1, 1756, a fierce fight of seven hours proved indecisive. Early in the day the King sent twenty squadrons of horse to meet disaster at the hands of the Austrian gunners, and later the Prussian infantry showed that they were still the men of Mollwitz and of Soor. The Prussians kept the field of battle, but of nearly 6400 killed and wounded more than half were theirs.
The relief of Pirna was checked but not frustrated. Lobositz is, however, chiefly memorable as the day on which the Austrians first encountered the208 Prussians at their best and were not beaten. It is no more than Frederick’s due to remark that the troops whom he had now to face were men who had learned what his father’s army had to teach. They had adopted the Old Dessauer’s iron ramrod, and the swiftness of their fire was no longer less than the half of their opponents’. Their artillery, thanks to the labours of Prince Lichtenstein, was always good and not seldom superior to the Prussian.
In little more than a fortnight after Lobositz the campaign of 1756 was at an end. On October 11th, Browne reached Schandau, on the right bank of the Elbe, where he expected the starving Saxons to join him. They were not ready, and after waiting two days he was compelled to retreat. The failure of the relieving expedition sealed the fate of Augustus’s army. On October 17th, the rank and file laid down their arms—only to be compelled, in defiance of the terms of surrender, to take them up again as soldiers of the King of Prussia.
Augustus, however, did not suffer martyrdom in vain. He lost his army and his Electorate, but his “ovine obstinacy” ruined the attack upon the Queen. In the hour of triumph Frederick wrote to Schwerin: “As for our stay in Bohemia, it is impossible for either of us to establish a sure footing there this year, for we have entered the province too late. We must confine ourselves to covering Silesia and Saxony.” Both Prussians and Austrians tacitly agreed to postpone the decisive blow till the new campaign.
To balance the gain and loss which Frederick owed to his preference of his own plan to the209 “timid policy” of Podewils we must take into account wider considerations of war and politics. By treating Saxony in Hohenzollern fashion, without scruple and without riot, the King undoubtedly gained some advantages. He found in the archives at Dresden the material for yet another manifesto to Europe. He tested and inspired his army, which only knew that under his leadership it had won a battle, captured an army, and conquered a state. He even increased its numbers by forcing the vanquished Saxons into the ranks. Above all, he won security for the western flank of Silesia and a safe base from which to attack Bohemia.
But all this was purchased at a great price in material and moral strength. Prussia was still a Power which had to ask herself whether she could bear a second or a third campaign. To raise new taxes was difficult if not impossible. Frederick, it might almost be said, paid for the war out of his own pocket with the help of his allies and of the enemy. Already he showed some signs of being pressed for money. In the middle of September he made secret arrangements for borrowing 300,000 thalers from a house of business in Berlin. Soon the Saxon officials were told that their pay must fall into arrear and Frederick observes with some brutality that Augustus, who had retired to his second capital at Warsaw, could support his queen and her household in Saxony from the French and Austrian subsidies. He thus denied to the victim that courtesy for his family which he had ostentatiously promised from the first.
210 It may be doubted whether 14,000 pressed men, even though some of them might otherwise have found their way to the enemy, compensated Prussia for the loyal veterans who fell at Lobositz. Throughout the war Frederick found no servants less reliable than the Saxons whom he had impressed and no foes more bitter than their countrymen who escaped. As for Saxony itself, it is true that if war must come, which Podewils regarded as dubious, Prussia derived much strength from her possession of it. But Frederick’s treatment of Saxony removed all possibility of escaping not only from a war, but from war upon the scale that he professed to expect. The spectacle of the suffering King inflamed all his enemies. As an exile in Warsaw Augustus was a more valuable ally to Austria than he could have been in Dresden. He made it absurd for Frederick to pose as the defender of German princes against the Hapsburg. In January, 1757, a majority of those princes, assembled in Diet at Ratisbon, solemnly commissioned the Hapsburg to marshal their corporate might against the Prussian aggressor.
Frederick had treated the defensive alliance between the two Empresses as a conspiracy against himself. Early in February it became such; save that what he might once have termed a conspiracy now wore the aspect of a crusade. All the North was summoned to unite with Austria in curbing Prussia for ever, and Russia bound herself to keep 80,000 men in the field until the lost provinces had been regained. Frederick had even performed211 what Kaunitz and the Pompadour could not completely accomplish. France now gave in her whole-hearted adhesion to the league for the recovery of Silesia and Glatz. She pledged herself to pay Austria a heavy annual subsidy, to place 105,000 French troops in the field, and to enlist 10,000 Germans. The history of the negotiations, which were prolonged till May 1, 1757, shows how real were the difficulties to be overcome before Bourbon and Hapsburg could unite.
In May, 1757, when the new campaign began, Frederick thus stood face to face with what it is hardly an exaggeration to term a world in arms. He, and no other, had brought Prussia to this pass. A coalition unprecedented in history was the result of the aggressions of 1740 and 1756. All the world believed that the hour of reckoning had struck and that the Third Silesian War would bring the punishment from which chance had delivered the King who made the First.
To the biographer of Frederick, 1757 is welcome, for Frederick now begins to be a hero. Had a chance bullet at Lobositz struck him down, the world would have known only a king who promised to bring in a new era of government, but who owed to his father’s work and methods the chief part of whatever success he achieved. For creative power he would have taken rank below the Great Elector and Frederick William, for military renown below the Old Dessauer and Schwerin; for the aggrandisement of his House, who knows? for who can calculate what havoc the Coalition of 1757 would have wrought212 with his dominions? The Frederick who had bequeathed to Prussia several volumes of prose and verse in French and the memory of sixteen years’ tenure of Silesia would hardly be known to fame as Frederick the Great.
In 1757, however, he takes his stand for the existence of Prussia. At the moment that the military balance turns against him the moral balance turns in his favour. Courage, energy, resource, determination, all displayed through a score of lifetimes, if sensations rather than moments make up life,—Frederick is the embodiment of these things during the next six years. At first it is his daring that seems to eclipse all else. If Frederick feared not God, neither did he regard man. Far from being dazzled by the array of sceptres marshalled against him, he determined to strike before his foes could form.
With the first breath of spring he despatched three royal princes and the Duke of Bevern against four several points in Bohemia. “If those false attacks have so far succeeded as to cover the King of Prussia’s real intention,” writes Mitchell on April 18th, “I may venture to say that His Prussian Majesty is upon the point of executing one of the boldest and one of the greatest designs that ever was attempted by man.” Just at this juncture a plot against his life was discovered. “I think upon the whole His Prussian Majesty has had a very narrow escape, which however seems to have made no impression at all upon him, nor to have created in him the least diffidence whatever of anybody.”213 Such is his Scotch friend’s account of the King at the outset of the chequered campaign to which he owes the immensity of his fame.
Frederick’s courage was not foolhardiness, for the very reason that he was one, and his enemies were many. Every coalition must encounter the difficulty of concerting a plan of campaign acceptable to all and the still greater difficulty of securing honest and punctual co-operation. The coalition against Frederick had the advantage that several of its members could serve the common cause by following the course most profitable to themselves. The Russians might be expected to overrun Ost-Preussen and the Swedes to attack Prussian Pomerania with the best will in the world, while the Austrians had every incentive to be vigorous in the conquest of Silesia. But France consented to help to make Silesia and Glatz Austrian chiefly in order that she might secure Austrian help nearer to her own borders. The motley forces of the Empire had little interest in the quarrel, and the activity of Russia depended upon a czarina whose health was bad. Speed and secrecy were alike unattainable by a machine which could be set in motion only after debate between the Board of War at Vienna, the corrupt and factious Court at St. Petersburg, and the inharmonious ministers of France. Once set in motion, however, the gigantic machine seemed irresistible. Kaunitz could launch battalions against Prussia from every point of the compass. Although a new English minister, William Pitt, seemed disposed to stand by Frederick,214 it might well be thought incredible that Prussia could escape destruction at the hands of such a multitude.
Frederick’s plain course was to make use of the speed and secrecy for which the Prussian movements were famous. The Queen was massing troops in Bohemia. She had determined to raise 150,000 men, but with sisterly partiality she halved their effectiveness by appointing Prince Charles to the command. This appointment favoured the plan which Mitchell admired so highly. Frederick was devising a new form of the man?uvre by which he decoyed the Austrians to Hohenfriedberg. He was so successful that everyone on the Austrian side believed that his one object was to maintain himself in Saxony. To them the four sham-invasions of Bohemia seemed to be designed to conceal the King’s defensive operations and to paralyse their own attack. The illusion was strengthened because at the same time they learned that Torgau and Dresden were being fortified in all haste and that barricades were rising on the roads from Bohemia into Saxony. The last thing that they could suspect was that Frederick was on the eve of attacking.
LEOPOLD, COUNT VON DAUN.
FROM A COPPER PRINT.
The result was that the movement planned for the previous autumn was now carried out in the face of 133,000 Austrians. Frederick’s three columns issued from Saxony, Schwerin came from Silesia, and before the end of April 117,000 Prussians were encamped in Bohemia. In the face of such a force the astonished Austrians abandoned the magazines which they had stored for the conquest of Saxony215 and fell back on Prague. Having occupied a strong position to the east of the city, Prince Charles awaited the arrival of Field-Marshal Daun, who was advancing from the south.
Now the Prussians were to learn that a royal command has drawbacks. Frederick was burning to attack the enemy. He had staked the success of the campaign on the chance of a pitched battle, and the timid tactics of Prince Charles filled him with impatience. At his back was the finest army in the world. He was opposed by cavalry who had never beaten their Prussian opponents since Mollwitz, by infantry who had never beaten them at all, and by a general whom he despised. Preferring, as usual, the boldest course, he crossed to the eastern side of the river Moldau, which runs through Prague, and signalled to Schwerin to join him.
Prince Charles did not venture to oppose a movement by which the enemy’s force was made almost equal in number to his own. Such inertness could be justified only if he believed either that he was very weak or that his situation was impregnable and that Daun’s arrival would make him sure of victory. His position indeed was strong enough to have given pause to a general less impatient than the King of Prussia. All Frederick’s royal authority had to be exerted before Schwerin would consent that 64,000 men, of whom the half had been marching since midnight, should attack a strongly fortified position held by 60,000 of the enemy. But the vanguard of Daun’s 30,000 was within ten miles of the capital and Frederick had his way.
216
PLAN OF PRAGUE, MAY 6, 1757.
His forlorn hope at Prague on May 6, 1757, was to cost more blood than had been spilled on any field in Europe for nearly fifty years. The Prussians began by marching with great skill round the Austrian right. Browne, however, suggested an effective counter-man?uvre, so that when Schwerin assailed the flank at ten o’clock he did so under unsuspected disadvantages of ground. “The cavalry began the encounter, and after several fruitless attacks Zieten with the reserve overthrew the Austrian cavalry. In the pursuit, however, his troops came upon one of the enemy’s camps and drank so deep that they were of no more use that day.” Such is the statement of Sch?fer, the Prussian historian of the war. At the same time the infantry of the first line pressed forward, but found that the way to the enemy lay through the treacherous slime of fishponds coated with green, which Frederick in his haste had taken to be meadow-land. They struggled across unharmed, but the well-served Austrian batteries began to destroy them at a range of 400 paces. Then their onslaught was shattered by the Austrian grenadiers, and Schwerin, as he seized the colours to rally his men, was slain by a blast of grape-shot. The Austrian grenadiers began a triumphant counter-charge, but they were unsupported, for their army had now no leader. Browne had fallen early in the charge, and Prince Charles collapsed in wrestling with problems too great for his powers. The Prussian second line was therefore able to repair the disaster of the first, and, after a terrible struggle at close quarters, they stormed the heights217 and won the battle. Many of the Austrians fled southwards across the river Sazawa, but the greater number took refuge behind the walls of Prague.
In the battle itself Frederick played the part of a brave and skilful leader. His first impression was that he had gained a decisive victory. In the evening he wrote to his mother:
“My brothers and I are well. The Austrians are in danger of losing the whole campaign and I find myself free with 150,000 men, and that we are masters of a kingdom which must provide us with troops and money. The Austrians are scattered like chaff before the wind. I am going to send part of my troops to compliment Messieurs les Fran?ais and to pursue the Austrians with the rest.”
He informed Wilhelmina that about 5000 men had been killed and wounded. To his ally, George II., he sent word that the battle had been “as decisive as possible,” and to his Scotch friend, Field-Marshal Keith, that he believed that the capture of Prague would finish the war. Fuller knowledge showed that these ideas were ill-conceived. The King’s impatience had caused an attack across treacherous ground with weary men. The pursuit therefore failed, and the Austrian casualties did not greatly exceed the Prussian. Frederick himself later computed his loss at 18,000 men, “without counting Marshal Schwerin, who alone was worth above 10,000.” The most moderate estimate states it at 12,500. The Austrians lost some 13,000, including prisoners, but nearly 11,000 more fled across the218 Sazawa, and the Prussians made an unwonted haul of baggage and artillery. One of the musketeers wrote home that 186,000 Prussians had beaten 295,000 Austrians and captured 200 guns. The army and the people were jubilant, but the price was great. “Schwerin’s death,” said the King, long after, “withered the laurels of victory, which was bought with too much precious blood. On this day fell the pillars of the Prussian infantry ... and a bloody and terrible war gave no time to rear them anew.”
The success of the campaign now hung on the fate of Prague. If the capital and its defenders fell into his hands without delay, the King might still execute the remainder of his daring scheme. He might sweep away Daun, enter Moravia, and dictate peace at Vienna. Thence he might lead his army to the western scene of war, to crush the forces of the Empire, and drive the French across the Rhine. A strong reinforcement, he believed, would enable Lehwaldt to grapple with the Russians, whose soldierly qualities he had not yet learned to appreciate. The moral effect of his victory was felt by all Europe. Frederick became the hero of the English nation. At Vienna depression reigned, and Kaunitz grew loud in his appeals to France and Russia. Roving bands of Prussians spread terror through the Empire by pretending to be the vanguard of the King, and demanding contributions from the magistrates of hostile towns with threats of stern measures if their demands were not complied with. Austria could not protect her German allies, and Louis XV. feared that she might now desert him as219 Prussia had deserted him in 1742 and 1745. If Prague fell the coalition would be shaken if not destroyed.
But however great the profit to be gained by the fall of Prague, Frederick realised that he could not hope to carry by storm a city which Browne had previously undertaken to hold with 8000 men and which now contained a garrison of 44,000. He therefore detached the Duke of Bevern with a force of 17,500 to observe Daun in the south, while he himself set to work to reduce Prague by starvation. In the hope of destroying the magazines he maintained a severe bombardment, which put the inhabitants to great suffering but brought little military advantage. He even brought a notorious burglar out of gaol to break into the city and procure information. Prince Charles, who had plenty of meal though little meat, did not risk his army in a sally en masse, but with the approval of his Government simply waited for Daun to set him free. This was an afflicting policy for the impatient King. On May 24th, Frederick hoped “at present more than ever that all this race of Austrian princes and beggars will be obliged to lay down their arms.” On May 29th, he informed Wilhelmina that a week ought to see the end, but before the week was over he began to admit the possibility of failure. On June 11th he wrote to Lehwaldt that it might be three or four weeks before he would be free to move. Next day, after hearing from Bevern that Daun could no longer be kept at bay, he sounded the knell of the whole enterprise:
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