By March 1758 he had got his army up to strength again and on the 14th he and Field Marshal Keith left Breslau and went off to besiege Schweidnitz, the last strong place held by the Austrians in Silesia. During such sieges and indeed always while campaigning, Frederick moved about incessantly in the surrounding countryside, talking to the people, the gentry and the priests. When in Bohemia he would take a book of Czech phrases with him, though it was easier to ask questions than to understand the replies. Catt always went with him for company when the day’s work was done. It took about five weeks for Schweidnitz to fall and then he turned his attention to Olmütz in Moravia; when he had taken it he planned to march on Vienna. Daun had expected him to attack Bohemia and had spent the winter preparing to meet him there. The siege of Olmütz gave rise to anxiety in Vienna but Daun made no effort to relieve the town—he camped two days’ march from it and waited. It did not fall as soon as Frederick had hoped; the siege dragged on and still Daun did nothing. On 16 June Frederick told Catt that the 18th was the day he always dreaded. He had dreamt that he saw his father with Wilhelmine and Augustus William, telling them to go on ahead. On the 18th a messenger from Berlin informed him that the Prince of Prussia had died. ‘What of?’ ‘Of bitter grief’ (aus Gram) was the reply. Frederick turned away. (But at the post-mortem the Prince was found to have a tumour on the brain.) Later Catt found the King in his tent bathed in tears, and they wept together, Frederick saying that he feared Catt had but a sad life with him. He told Wilhelmine that Augustus William had made things very difficult for him, but that it was probably more the fault of his entourage than his own. He added that if anything should happen to her he would have no desire to go on living. Prince Henry had always taken the side of Augustus William, who had cursed Winterfeldt almost with his dying breath; cold letters passed between him and the King, whose treatment of their brother had fed the hatred that Henry always half felt for him. The heir to the throne was Augustus William’s eldest son, Frederick William, who became Prince of Prussia.
The King now suffered a severe military reverse. A convoy of 4,000 supply-wagons, on which he had counted, was wiped out by General Loudon and over 2,000 of Zieten’s men guarding it were killed. Frederick’s plans for 1758 collapsed and he had to rethink his campaign. He immediately raised the siege of Olmütz. It was typical of him that, from having been in black despair, his spirits rose as soon as he had taken this decision and anybody would have thought he had just won a battle. He had altered a few verses from Racine’s Athalie, substituting the pious Empress for the impious queen:
Daigne, daigne, mon Dieu, sur Mathan et sur elle
Répandre cet esprit d’imprudence et d’erreur
De la chute des rois funeste avant-coureur
(Deign, O God, to fill her and Mathan with that spirit of rashness and error which presages the downfall of kings) became Daigne, daigne, mon Dieu, sur Kaunitz et sur elle, and so on, and whenever he said Daigne, daigne, mon Dieu Catt knew that he was in a good mood. He did so now and gave out that any officer who looked gloomy would be cashiered there and then; in a very short time he was on the march. The movement of a whole army, covering forty miles of a single road, gave Daun a superb opportunity to attack, but he was too cautious and Frederick settled unmolested into Königgrätz where he knew he would be safe. He took stock of the situation. The news from the west was good: Ferdinand of Brunswick had inflicted a severe defeat on the French at Krefeld, where the charming Gisors fell, and the English were now performing marvels against them in North America. But the Russians under Marshal Fermor had taken East Prussia and forced the citizens of Königsberg to swear fealty to the Empress Elizabeth. Frederick never forgave them and never again set foot there. Fermor was slowly but surely advancing towards the Oder, and such appalling tales of Russian atrocities were coming in that the whole of Europe trembled.
Frederick marched north and at the end of August he arrived at Küstrin where he met Fermor with about equal numbers. He could have reduced him and forced him to leave Brandenburg without fighting a battle; but as usual he was in a hurry: he wanted to get back to Silesia. Also, in spite of the warnings of James Keith, who was for ever telling Frederick that the Russians were incomparable soldiers, he thought they were a disorganized horde, good for terrorizing civilians but useless in the face of a highly trained army. He attacked Fermor at Zorndorf, near Küstrin; there was a particularly bloody engagement and although Frederick counted it as a victory it was an incomplete one—the Russians fought with obstinate heroism and refused to admit defeat, remained on the field and fought again the next day. The Prussians lost about 11,000 men and Fermor 20,000 but he was driven off only as far as Landsberg, where he remained and might have reorganized his army, had not the usual problems of supply sent him back to Russia. The Prussians were exhausted and demoralized, and certain regiments which had not fought too well were badly treated by Frederick to the end of his life. ‘They ran away like tarts’, he said. Another cause for worry was that the Swedes, under Count Hamilton, were doing better than usual in Pomerania where they were soon to be checked, however, by mutinies.
Henri de Catt had been told to stay behind in Saxony but he had doggedly followed the King. When he caught up with him Frederick’s entourage strongly advised him to go away again: ‘He is in a frightful temper and you are not supposed to be of this journey.’ Catt calmly went in to the King, who was touchingly pleased to see him but said there were no carriages and he would have to ride, which he did. He joined in the Battle of Zorndorf on his nag; he was told that half-way through the King had asked if anybody had seen him and if he was all right. For the next few days he and Frederick stayed at Tamsel, the house of Frederick’s old love Mme de Wreech. The Russians had been there and left it in an appalling state; a dead woman, horribly mutilated, lay by the front door and the contents of the house had been smashed or burnt. Mme de Wreech had fled to Berlin; Frederick sent her a little money and received in return a flood of begging letters. He answered every one in his own hand but said he could do no more for her: ‘We are all in the same case’. He was so hard pushed now that he was reluctantly obliged to draw the first £200,000 on his loan from the English.
Altogether things looked bad for Frederick. He turned south to meet Prince Henry whom he had left to defend Saxony. Henry was thirty-two and beginning to show that he was a remarkable soldier. He had done wonderfully well with the small force at his disposal, and Dresden, which had been threatened by Daun, was safe; they dined together there and the King said that nothing so cheerful had happened to him for months. Henry was quite friendly again and the brothers united by a new worry—Wilhelmine was desperately ill. ‘Remember’, Frederick wrote to Henry, ‘that I was born and brought up with my sister Bayreuth, that these first attachments are indissoluble, that the tenderness between us has never changed and that though we have separate bodies we have but one soul.’ His letters to her at this time are heart-rending—they beg and implore her not to desert him: ‘My life without you would be unbearable and that is the truth.’ Dead tired, Wilhelmine could no longer write herself; her sad little letters are dictated: ‘I live and die content if I know that you are happy.’
The Austrians were everywhere in Silesia, living off the country and besieging Neisse and Kosel. Frederick wanted to relieve Neisse but Daun was hanging about near Dresden, encamped in a strong place, and refusing an engagement as usual. Frederick used to say Daun must have been born on a mountain—he had but to see one to rush up it and stay there. For about a month there was nothing to be done but wait and watch—very bad for Frederick’s nerves. At last he decided to be off, followed by the Austrian army. He could see it from a village called Hochkirch on a hill surrounded by forest. There he camped. His generals told him he had chosen a poor position. They might have saved their breath: he never listened to them and never in his life called a council of war. The favoured Field Marshal Keith arrived the next day and spoke out: ‘If the Austrians let us stay here, they deserve to be
hanged.’ Frederick only laughed and said he hoped they were more frightened of him than of the gallows. Daun had never attacked him yet and the King had begun to think he never would do so.
But as the church clock at Hochkirch struck five on 14 October 1758, the Imperial troops fell upon the Prussians and began to massacre them in their tents. It was pitch-dark, until the Austrians lit up the scene by setting fire to the village, and the utmost confusion reigned. James Keith, Frederick’s brother-in-law Francis of Brunswick, five other generals and more than a quarter of the army were killed; 101 guns and most of the tents were captured. Frederick, disdaining to sound the retreat, extricated his remaining troops almost single-handed, re-formed them in perfect order and killed some 6,000 Austrians, who also lost at least 2,000 deserters in the woods. Then, while Daun was trying to decide on his next move, Frederick had got between him and Silesia. Daun made for Dresden—Frederick was again too quick for him. He had once more mitigated the effects of a defeat by his extraordinary presence of mind, courage and energy.
The Austrians celebrated Hochkirch as a total victory and Pope Clement XIII blessed a sword and a hat and sent them to Daun, a reward which the early Popes bestowed on generals who had defeated the Infidel. (His predecessor Benedict XIV, who had just died, would not have made such a fool of himself.) For Frederick there was above all the sorrow of losing Keith. But all sorrows and all defeats were as nothing to him now; he was brought to the very depths by the bitterest grief of his whole life. On the day of Hochkirch, Wilhelmine died. The news arrived as he was finishing a letter to Prince Henry—‘grand Dieu, ma sœur de Bayreuth!’ Between marches and renewed attempts to bring the Austrians to battle before the winter he would shut himself up in the dark, keeping Catt always with him. Prince Henry came and was a comfort; but he, Ferdinand and Amelia were so much younger that they seemed to belong to a different family—they had not shared the strains and stresses of Frederick’s childhood and could not take the place of Wilhelmine. Besides he must have known that Henry’s love for him was uneasy. After the death of his sister, the King changed very much; he lost a great deal of his buoyancy and never cared for society again. ‘I, who used to be as frisky as a young horse bounding in a field, have become as slow as old Nestor, greying, eaten with grief, riddled with infirmities, just about fit to be thrown to the dogs.’ He told Mme de Camas that like all old people he no longer ate any supper—only a cup of chocolate. ‘You will hardly know me, my hair is grey, my teeth are falling out, my face is wrinkled like the furbelow of a skirt, my back bent like a bow and my outlook as sad as that of a Trappist monk.’
In November, after long freezing days in the saddle, Frederick fell ill with a high fever and red patches on his hands and face. Catt begged him to continue the march in a carriage. ‘In a carriage! What an idea! I’m not an old lady, you know, and then what would my army say if it saw le Monsieur taking it easy in a carriage? What an example for my officers!—they would start pampering themselves for the least little thing.’ General von Zastrow then came to see how the King was and also urged him to drive. ‘You take me for an old whore’, said Frederick. At daybreak on a freezing morning he was up on his horse again, saying he had never felt so cold in his life; very ill that night with such an appalling headache that he could not attend to business; much better the next day and back on his horse, and thereafter cured. These attacks became more and more frequent; he always treated them in the same way unless he was so helpless with rheumatism or gout that he had to be carried. He had no faith whatever in physicians—‘the impotent witnesses of our sufferings’—and Catt used to bore him by saying and repeating how odd it was that he had no doctor.
He stayed at Dresden for three weeks that winter, and never went out of doors. The Queen of Poland had died, killed, it was said, by his evil treatment of her, so he lived in the palace and enjoyed the pictures, spending sometimes five hours on end in the gallery. He had begun to write his Histoire de la Guerre de Sept Ans and the Épître to his sister. He thought and spoke of her continually—grief, he said, rode with him wherever he was. Catt, himself religious, thought that the King instinctively believed in a future life and had to force himself not to do so. ‘Perhaps I shall see her again, and my brother and my mother whom I loved so much, and all the great men of antiquity I have so much admired—and if we don’t believe in Providence how can anything be explained?’ But when the full force of his sorrow was abated he relapsed into his old ways, making naughty jokes about religion to Catt, who took them calmly saying, ‘One day you will believe—it will happen all of a sudden.’ In December he went into winter quarters at Breslau. He was still the master of Saxony and Silesia in spite of Daun’s holy hat and sword. Frederick called him the ‘blessed one’ and said if he had had a toque bénite he would have won the war by now—God seemed to have heard his prayer: Daigne, daigne, mon Dieu, sur Kaunitz et sur elle . . .
18. The Great Frederick
The year 1759 must have been the worst that Frederick ever knew. He was ill, he was sad, he said himself that he was tired of life and that were it not for honour he would have committed suicide long ago. Almost all the people he had loved were dead, as well as his marvellous veterans. His army now consisted of green recruits whom he got where he could; some of his officers were only fifteen years old. Like Mme de Maintenon and the Duke of Wellington, he said he hoped they would frighten the enemy as much as they frightened him. These less disciplined soldiers were much rougher with the civilians than their predecessors had been, and Frederick and Prince Henry, both more humane and sensitive than formerly, expended themselves in trying to make them behave. The peasants suffered horribly in this war. Much of their produce was stolen as a matter of course and their crops were trampled; worst of all, their houses were burnt to make bivouac fires. They never failed to assemble heaps of logs for the purpose but after an exhausting day the soldiers found it easier to set fire to a house and sit round that—it burnt quicker, gave out more heat and lasted longer. Of course they were absolutely forbidden to do this; and Frederick reckoned that his soldiers had not burnt more than 1,000 houses, whereas the Russians had burnt 15,000. The Prussians were not cruel for the sake of cruelty—the Austrians and especially the Hungarians were far worse. They had a wicked habit of slitting up the peasants’ beds and scattering the feathers, which had taken years to collect, so that the owners were left without the only comfortable thing they had in life. Even the Austrians were appalled by the behaviour of their allies the Russians: they committed every atrocity under the sun and raped everybody, including the Burgomaster of Beuthen, whose wife said she really thought they might stick to women.
Frederick began to be very hard on his generals, almost unbearably sarcastic. ‘Attack, as I do’, was his perpetual cry. Easier said than done: the only generals he now had capable of carrying out a difficult enterprise on their own were Ferdinand of Brunswick, tied down on the French front, and Prince Henry, of whom Frederick used to say, ‘He is the only one of us who has never made a mistake.’ Henry did not return the compliment. His temperament and talents were defensive and he affected to regard his brother as a mad gambler who might at any moment lose all by some ill-considered action. He said that Frederick’s victories had nothing to do with his generalship but were due to the perfection of their father’s army. (But Napoleon said it was not the army that defended Prussia for seven years against the three European powers, it was Frederick the Great.) Among the higher ranks at Henry’s H.Q. it was the fashion to decry Frederick and all his works, although Catt, who spent some weeks there, said the younger serving officers worshipped him.
In France the Duc de Choiseul who was now at the head of affairs pursued the war with more energy than his predecessor, Cardinal de Bernis; born a Lorrainer, his loyalties were divided between France and the Empire, and nobody was more faithful than he to the new alliance. The separate peace which Frederick had hoped to make with the French King was now out of the question; on the contrary a new and more bindi
ng treaty was signed by Louis XV and Maria Theresa. The English were proving half-hearted allies. They paid the promised money: that was all. Frederick asked for ships to be sent to the Baltic, but they were busy elsewhere. He became rather cold to Mitchell, who was seen one day by Prussian generals going off to his own tent at the King’s dinner-time, sadly remarking ‘no fleet, no dinner’. They told Frederick, who laughed very much and sent for him. At the Porte, where Frederick was hoping to stir up the Sultan to open another front with the Austrians, the English Ambassador did everything in his power to undermine this policy.
The campaign started late. The Russians under a new general, Soltikoff, were rolling back towards Brandenburg while Frederick, as usual, was trying to come to grips with Daun. It was not until August that Daun sent a force under the excellent General Loudon, who had served ten years in the Russian army and spoke the language, to join Soltikoff; once more Frederick left Prince Henry to play the watch-dog and hastened north-east. There was a heat-wave; the men were sometimes short of food and generally short of water; they hated such marches worse than a battle—the last, over the burning, shifty, sandy soil of Brandenburg was a nightmare. The King had not slept for a week. He was too late to stop Loudon from joining forces with the Russians at Frankfurt-on-Oder. The Allies were not on happy terms. Although Loudon had the cavalry which the Russians needed, Soltikoff covered him with insults and reproaches because he had not brought food. The Russian commissariat was as usual disorganized, and although the soldiers had stolen everything in sight they were still half starved. Soltikoff had been on the point of going home again when the Austrians appeared.
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