by Will Durant
Only by wits, economy, a good army, and good generals. His own wits were as keen as any; he was the best-educated ruler of his age; he came off with honors in correspondence, conversation, and controversy with Voltaire. But his tongue was too sharp to be loosed; he might have had calmer seas had he not spoken of Elizaveta Petrovna, Maria Theresa, and Mme. de Pompadour as the “three first whores of Europe”;12 it is comforting to see that even the Great can be foolish now and then. As to the economy of Prussia, Frederick subjected it to state control and what seemed to him the unavoidable needs of possible war. He did not dare, in the circumstances, to change the feudal structure of Prussian life, lest it disturb the feudal organization of his army. That army was his salvation and his religion. Ninety per cent of his revenues went to its maintenance.13 He called it the Atlas whose strong shoulders carried the state.14 He built it up from the 100,000 men bequeathed him by his father to 150,000 in 1756. He disciplined it with severe punishments to immediate and precise obedience, to march steadily toward the opposing line without firing a shot till ordered, to change direction, and maneuver en masse, under fire. It had, at the beginning of the war, the best generals in Europe after Frederick himself—Schwerin, Seydlitz, and James Keith.
Almost as important as his generals were the spies that he had scattered among his enemies. They left him no doubt that Maria Theresa was forming a cordon of hostile powers around him. In 1753-55 his agents in Dresden and Warsaw secured copies of secret correspondence, between the Saxon and Austrian ministries, which convinced him that these courts were conspiring to attack and—if fortune favored—dismember Prussia, and that France was conniving at the scheme.15 On June 23, 1756, he ordered the Prussian general in Königsberg to be prepared for an attack from Russia. He notified the British government that “the court of Vienna has three designs to which its present steps are tending: to establish its despotism in the Empire, to ruin the Protestant cause, and to reconquer Silesia.”16 He learned that Saxony was planning to enlarge its army from seventeen thousand to forty thousand during the winter;17 he guessed that the allies were waiting for the spring of 1757 to advance upon him from three directions; and he resolved to strike before their mobilization was complete.
He felt that his only chance of escaping from his peril was to disable at least one of his foes before they could unite in action. Schwerin agreed with him, but one of his ministers, Count von Podewils, begged him not to give his enemies excuse for branding him as the aggressor; Frederick called him “Monsieur de la timide politique”18 Long ago, in a secret “Political Testament” (1752), he had advised his successor to conquer Saxony and thereby give Prussia the geographical unity, the economic resources, and the political power indispensable to survival.19 He had put the idea aside as beyond himself to realize; now it seemed to him a military necessity. He must protect his western frontier by disarming Saxony. Even in his almost idealistic Anti-Machiavel (1740) he had sanctioned an offensive war to forestall a threatened attack.20 Mitchell, the Prussian minister in England, informed him that while the British government strongly desired the maintenance of peace on the Continent, it recognized the emergency that Frederick faced, and would not hold him “in the least to blame if he tried to forestall his enemies instead of waiting until they carried out their hostile intentions.”21
In July, 1756, he sent an envoy to Maria Theresa soliciting assurance that Austria intended no attack upon Prussia either in the current year or in the next. A member of the Austrian cabinet thought such assurance should be given; Kaunitz refused to send it; all that Maria Theresa would say was that “in the present crisis I deem it necessary to take measures for the security of myself and my allies, which tend to the prejudice of no one.”22 Frederick sent a second message to the Empress, asking for a clearer reply to his request for assurance; she answered that she “had concluded no offensive alliance; and although the critical situation of Europe compelled her to arm, she had no intention to violate the Treaty of Dresden [which pledged her to peace with Frederick], but she would not bind herself by any promise from acting as circumstances required.”23 Frederick had anticipated such a reply; before it reached him he led his army into Saxony (August 29, 1756). So began the Seven Years’ War.
II. THE OUTLAW: 1756-57
He made a halfhearted attempt to enlist the Saxon Elector as an ally, offering him Maria Theresa’s Bohemia as a bribe. Augustus scorned this vicarious philanthropy; he ordered his generals to stop Frederick’s advance, and fled to Warsaw. The Saxon force was too small to resist the finest army in Europe; it withdrew to the citadel at Pirna; Frederick entered Dresden unopposed (September 9, 1756). At once he bade his agents open the Saxon archives and bring him the originals of those documents that had revealed Saxony’s participation in the plan to chasten, perhaps to dismember, Prussia. The aging Electress-Queen with her own person barred access to the archives, and demanded that Frederick should respect her royal inviolability; he ordered her to be removed; she fled; the documents were secured.
Maria Theresa sent an army from Bohemia to dislodge the invader; Frederick met it and defeated it at Lobositz, on the road from Dresden to Prague (October 1). He returned to besiege Pirna; it surrendered (October 15); he impressed the fourteen thousand captive Saxon soldiers into his own divisions, arguing that this was cheaper than feeding them as prisoners; the German appetite was notorious. He declared Saxony a conquered country, and applied its revenues to his own needs. During the winter he published the Saxon documents to the world. Maria Theresa called them forgeries, and appealed to France, Russia, and all God-fearing Christians to aid her against the man who, by flagrant aggression, had again plunged Europe into war.
Europe generally agreed in condemning Frederick. The German principalities, fearing a fate like Saxony’s if Frederick should triumph, declared war upon Prussia (January 17, 1757), and raised a Reichsarmee, or Imperial Army, for action against the Prussian King. Kaunitz lost no time in reminding Louis XV that France had promised help in case Austria should be threatened. The Dauphine, daughter of the Saxon Elector, pleaded with her father-in-law to rescue her father. Mme. de Pompadour, who had hoped to enjoy her reign in peace, now inclined to war. In appreciation of her aid Maria Theresa sent her a royal portrait decorated with gems valued at 77,-278 livres;24 Pompadour became martial. Louis, usually slow to decide, decided with impetuous vigor. By a second Treaty of Versailles (May 1, 1757) France bound herself in defensive-offensive alliance with Austria, pledged her an annual subsidy of twelve million florins, agreed to equip two German armies, and proposed to devote a French force of 105,000 men to the “destruction totale de la Prusse.” She promised never to make peace with Prussia until Silesia had been restored to Austria. When that restoration had been consummated France was to receive five frontier towns in the Austrian Netherlands, and these southern Netherlands were to be transferred to the Bourbon Infante of Spain in return for Spanish duchies in Italy. Perhaps France was knowingly writing off her colonies to British conquest by devoting nearly all her resources to absorbing “Belgium.” Kaunitz could feel that he had won a vital diplomatic victory.
He found it easy now to draw Russia into active aid. The Convention of St. Petersburg (February 2, 1757) committed Russia and Austria each to put eighty thousand troops into the field, and to make war until Silesia had been reunited with Austria, and Prussia had been reduced to a minor power. Turning to Sweden, Kaunitz brought her into the alliance by guaranteeing to her, in the event of victory, all that part of Pomerania which had been conceded to her in the Treaty of Westphalia. Sweden was to contribute 25,000 men, Austria and France were to finance them. Poland, under its refugee King Augustus III, pledged her modest resources to the Franco-Austrian alliance. Now nearly all of Europe except England, Hanover, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Turkey, and Hesse-Cassel was united against Frederick.
And England was tempted to leave Frederick to his fate. George II saw with horror that his beloved Hanover, the electorate from which his father had come to r
ule Britain, lay defenseless in the path of overwhelming armies, with Frederick too distant and harassed to send substantial aid. The temptation was made almost irresistible when Kaunitz offered to leave Hanover inviolate if England would keep out of the Continental war; at that moment Frederick’s fate was touch and go. Pitt, who was appointed secretary of state on November 19, 1756, was at first inclined to let Prussia and Hanover shift for themselves, while England would concentrate all her martial resources upon the contest for colonies; little wonder that George II, loving Hanover, hated Pitt. Soon Pitt changed his mind, and declared that a France victorious against Frederick would be master of Europe, and soon of England too; Parliament must vote money for Frederick and troops for Hanover; France must be made to spend herself in Europe, while England would pluck colonies and markets out of the conquered seas.
So in January, 1757, Britain signed a second alliance with Prussia, promising subsidies to Frederick and soldiers to Hanover. But then, suddenly, Pitt was dismissed (April 5), politics befuddled policy, help to Frederick was delayed, and for almost a year he stood alone, with 145,000 men, against armies converging from every quarter upon him: in the west 105,000 troops from France and 20,000 from the German states; in the south 133,000 from Austria; in the east 60,000 from Russia; in the north 16,000 from Sweden. And on that same day which saw Pitt fall, the Emperor Francis I—the usually amiable and docile husband of Maria Theresa—officially branded Frederick as an outlaw, and called upon all good men to hunt him out as an impious enemy of mankind.
III. FROM PRAGUE TO ROSSBACH: 1757
On January 10 Frederick sent to his ministers in Berlin some secret instructions: “If I am killed, affairs must continue without the slightest alteration.... If I have the bad luck to be captured, I forbid the smallest consideration for my person, or the slightest attention to anything I may write in captivity.”25
It was a useless gesture, for without his military genius Prussia was lost. His only hope lay in facing his foes one at a time before they could unite. The French were not yet ready for battle, and perhaps the regiments that England was sending to Hanover could hold them for a while. The Austrians were accumulating in nearby Bohemia and Moravia immense magazines of arms and provisions to equip their armies for an invasion of Silesia. Frederick decided first to capture those precious stores, fight the Austrians, then march back to face the French. He led his own force from Saxony, and ordered the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern from East Germany, and Marshal Schwerin from Silesia, to advance into Bohemia and meet him in the hills overlooking Prague from the west. It was so done; the magazines were captured; and on May 6, near Prague, 64,000 Prussians met 61,000 Austrians under Prince Charles of Lorraine in the first great battle of the war.
The issue was decided not by numbers, nor by strategy, but by courage. Schwerin’s regiments, under Austrian fire, marched waist-deep, shoulder-deep, through morasses. For a time they lost heart and turned in flight; then Schwerin, aged seventy-three, rallied them, wrapped the colors about his body, rode straight in the face of the foe, was struck by five balls at once, and fell dead. His men, loving him almost more than they feared death, charged in fury against the enemy, and turned defeat into victory. The slaughter on both sides was enormous, and Frederick’s losses included four hundred officers and his best general; in this war generals did not die in bed. The 46,000 surviving Austrians retired into their citadel in Prague, and prepared to resist siege.
But Frederick found siege difficult, for Marshal Leopold von Daun, ablest of the Austrian commanders, was coming up from Moravia with another 64,000 men. Leaving part of his army to blockade the citadel, Frederick marched eastward with 32,000 troops, and met the advancing masses at Kolin (June 16). The odds against him were too great, and the generalship of Daun was in this case superior to his own. Two of Frederick’s generals disobeyed his orders, causing confusion; Frederick lost his temper, and shouted to his retreating cavalry, “Would you live forever?”26 The infantry, overwhelmed by carnage, refused to advance. Frederick, despondent, withdrew from the field, leaving 14,000 Prussians dead, wounded, or prisoners. He led his 18,000 survivors back to Prague, abandoned the siege, and returned with his remnants toward Saxony.
At Leitmeritz he rested his army for three weeks. There, on July 2, he received word that his mother, Sophia Dorothea, had died. The iron man of war broke down, wept, and secluded himself for a day. Perhaps he wondered, now, whether his assault on Silesia, seventeen years before, had been a foolish tempting of Nemesis. He shared his grief with his sister Wilhelmine, margravine of Bayreuth, whom he loved beyond any other soul. On July 7, his pride nearly spent, he sent her a desperate appeal:
Since you, my dear sister, insist upon undertaking the great work of peace, I beg you to be good enough to send M. de Mirabeau to … offer the favorite [Mme. de Pompadour, formerly Cotillon IV] as much as 500,000 crowns for peace.... I leave it all to you … whom I adore, and who, although far more accomplished than I, is another myself.27
Nothing came of this approach. Wilhelmine tried another way: she wrote to Voltaire, then living in Switzerland, and begged him to use his influence. Voltaire transmitted her proposal to Cardinal de Tencin, who had opposed the Franco-Austrian alliance. Tencin tried and failed.28 The allies were sniffing the scent of victory. Maria Theresa talked now of completely dismembering Frederick’s realm: not only must Silesia and Glatz be restored to her, but Magdeburg and Halberstadt were to go to Augustus III, Pomerania was to revert to Sweden, and Cleves and Ravensburg were to reward the Elector Palatine.
Her hopes seemed reasonable. A French “army of the Dauphine” had entered Germany; part of it, under Pompadour’s favorite general, the Prince de Soubise, was coming to join with the Imperial army at Erfurt; another part, under Maréchal d’Estrées, advanced to meet a Hanoverian force under George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland. Near the village of Hastenbeck the French so badly defeated this army (July 26) that the Duke signed at Kloster-Zeven (September 8) a “convention” by which he promised to keep his Hanoverian troops from any further action against France.
Word of this humiliating capitulation may have reached Frederick at approximately the same time as news that a Swedish army had landed in Pomerania, and a Russian army of 100,000 men under Marshal Stepan Apraksin had invaded East Prussia and overwhelmed a force of 30,000 Prussians at Gross-Jägersdorf (July 30). These reverses, added to his own debacle in Bohemia, almost destroyed Frederick’s hope of overcoming enemies so numerous and so fortified with reserves of materials and men. Having abandoned the morality as well as the theology of Christianity, he fell back upon the ethics of the Stoics, and meditated suicide. To the end of the war he carried on his person a phial of poison; he was resolved that his foes should never take him except as a corpse. On August 24 he sent to Wilhelmine a semihysterical paean to death:
And now, ye promoters of sacred lies, go on leading cowards by the nose; … to me the enchantment of life is ended, the charm disappears. I see that all men are but the sport of Destiny, and that if there do exist some Gloomy and Inexorable Being, who allows a despised herd of creatures to go on multiplying here, he values them as nothing; he looks down upon a Phalaris crowned and a Socrates in chains, upon our virtues and our misdeeds, upon the horror of war and the cruel plagues that ravage the earth, as things indifferent to him. Wherefore my sole refuge and only haven, dear sister, is in the arms of death.29
She answered (September 15) by vowing to join him in suicide:
My dearest brother, your letter, and the one you wrote to Voltaire, … have almost killed me. What fatal resolutions, great God! Ah, my dear brother, you say you love me, and yet you drive a dagger into my heart. Your letter … made me shed rivers of tears. Now I am ashamed of such weakness. … Your lot shall be mine. I will not survive either your misfortunes or those of the House I belong to. You may calculate that such is my firm resolution.
But after this avowal let me entreat you to look back at what was the pitiable state of your enemy when y
ou lay before Prague. It is the sudden whirl of Fortune for both parties. … Caesar was once the slave of pirates, and became lord of the earth. A great genius like yours finds resources even when all seems lost. I suffer a thousand times more than I can tell you; nevertheless hope does not abandon me.... I must finish, but I shall never cease to be, with the most profound respect, your Wilhelmine.30
She appealed to Voltaire to support her plea, and early in October, in his first letter to Frederick since 1753, he seconded her arguments:
The Catos and Othos, whose death your Majesty thinks noble, had nothing else they could do but fight or die. … You must keep in mind how many courts there are that see in your invasion of Saxony a violation of international law. … Our morality and your situation are far from requiring such an act [as suicide]. … Your life is needed; you know how dear it is to a numerous family. … The affairs of Europe are never long on the same basis, and it is the duty of a man like you to hold himself in readiness for events.... If your courage led you to that heroic extremity it would not be approved. Your partisans would condemn it, your enemies would triumph.31
To which Frederick replied in prose and verse:
Pour moi, menacé du naufrage,
Je dois, en affrontant l’orage,
Penser, vivre, et mourir en roi—
“as for me, menaced with shipwreck, I must, confronting the storm, think, live, and die like a king.”32
Between poems (always in French) he searched for the French army; now he longed for a battle that would settle for him the question of life or death. At Leipzig, October 15, he sent for Johann Christoph Gottsched (who wrote verses in German), and tried to convince him that German poetry was impossible. So many explosions—Knap, Klop, Krotz, Krok; so many gutturals, so many consonants—even in the professor’s name five in a row; how could you make a melody with such a language? Gottsched protested; Frederick had to prepare for another march; but ten days later, back in Leipzig, he received the old poet again, found time to listen to a Gottsched ode in German, and gave him a gold snuffbox as a parting token of good will.