Frederick the Great

by Nancy Mitford

  Frederick had 50,000 men against 68,000 of the Allies. At the beginning of the war that would have meant nothing; now he doubted if they could win a pitched battle. However, an Austrian corps under General Haddik was advancing on Berlin, obliging Frederick to attack the Russians—he said a soul in purgatory was not in a worse situation than he.

  One can hardly bear to read about the Battle of Kunersdorf, 12 August 1759. All the circumstances were against the King. His soldiers had been up for two nights with hardly anything to eat, moving the heavy artillery. The terrain, unfamiliar to him, favoured the enemy. Loudon was a better general than any of Frederick’s. The courage of the Russians was equal to their barbarism, as he had already noted. Nevertheless, the battle started well for the Prussians who, fighting like fresh troops, overcame the Russian left and took seventy guns. Frederick sent word to his wife in Berlin that the day was won. After three more heroic attacks which dislodged the Russians from their prepared positions, Frederick’s generals told him that the men were done for and urged him to disengage; after the fourth attack they implored him to do so, but only one more hillock, surmounted by a battery, remained to be taken in order for the victory to be total. It was not in Frederick’s nature to stop at such a moment. When he was about two hundred yards from the crest Loudon arrived there with his Grenadiers and repulsed the Prussians. Frederick ordered the artillery to advance but the guns stuck in the sandy soil. Then the King himself led the cavalry up the hill: ‘Boys, don’t leave me, don’t desert me.’ They did not, but it was murder. His best remaining cavalrymen were almost wiped out, all for nothing. Loudon counter-attacked; the Prussian infantry, which had now been under fire for fifteen hours, still held firm, but then he returned to the charge with fresh troops who carried all before them. Half Frederick’s army lay dead and dying on the field. He himself did everything he could to be killed—two horses were shot under him, his clothes were torn and a snuff-box in his pocket was pulverized. ‘Won’t some damned bullet finish me?’ But he was unhurt and a few devoted Hussars dragged him from the battlefield. He seemed like a sleep-walker and very soon fell under a haystack where hours later he and his escort were found, all snoring.

  Everybody supposed that the Allies would now occupy Berlin and seize the whole of Brandenburg. Frederick placed himself, with six depleted battalions, in a country house at Fürstenwalde between the enemy and the capital and here he shut himself up for two days, giving out that he was gravely ill. He handed over his command to General von Finck, made his officers swear allegiance to his heir, the Prince of Prussia, and appointed Prince Henry as Commander-in-Chief of the army. He sent word that the Queen must take his archives, go to Potsdam or Brandenburg and there await events; he even found time to write to d’Argens in Berlin with the same instructions. Obviously he was contemplating suicide; what prevented him may well have been a brave, sensible letter from d’Argens, who said that he would not budge as long as the King was alive and well, but that indescribable horrors would befall his subjects if anything should happen to him. Caesar, Turenne and Condé had all been in a similar case —Frederick must take a long view, and in the end things would turn his way. If he died now he would be blamed everlastingly for the ruin of his country. Two days later Frederick replied, saying that the enemy seemed to be retreating to Frankfurt-on-Oder and he would love to see d’Argens—would he come and bring Frederick’s cook, Noël, with him? But on the same day he sent another note; ‘Daun is marching on Berlin—I forbid you to come; leave my unhappy country at once. The troops are utterly discouraged; I shall give them eau-de-vie and hope to die sword in hand.’

  But days went by and the enemy did nothing to follow up the victory. ‘They applaud their success’, Frederick said, ‘and bless their good luck instead of giving the coup de grâce.’ His spirits began to rise. At the Allied headquarters a furious quarrel was going on, the Russians saying that the Austrians had left them to bear the worst of the fight and threatening to go home unless they were immediately given money and ammunition; but Maria Theresa was short of both. The Allies finally made for Silesia. Frederick, pulling himself and the remains of his army together, managed to bar the way; soon the Russians were going home for the winter. Daun besieged Dresden whose tiny garrison soon surrendered; then he shut himself up there. In Vienna, where the news of Frederick’s final knock-out had been expected hourly, the disappointment was intense; Daun’s stocks were so low that his wife dared not leave her house.

  Frederick spent the winter at Freiberg in Saxony and busied himself vainly making overtures for peace to all the allies of Maria Theresa. He scraped together a new army of 100,000 men, composed, he admitted, of untrained Saxon peasants, deserters from the enemy and every sort of riff-raff. He said it was more for show than anything else. He was in a mood of black despair. ‘My soul is anxious, agitated, overwhelmed.’ As always he turned for comfort to books and the post-bag. ‘Do write’, he said to his friends. D’Argens’s letters were full of encouragement. He had heard from Paris that the French had lost Quebec and were more utterly ruined than during the blackest days of Louis XIV. They would surely be unable to give the Empress money to pay her barbarians and there would be peace in the spring. Frederick asked him to go to Sans Souci and have a look at the garden. ‘I feel so old, so ill, so utterly discouraged.’ He was writing regularly to Voltaire now and this caused some anxiety to Mitchell:

  for I believe the court of France make use of the artful pen of Voltaire to draw secrets from the King of Prussia, and when that Prince writes as a wit to a wit he is capable of great indiscretions. But what surprises me still more is that whenever Voltaire’s name is mentioned, his Prussian Majesty never fails to give him the epithets he may deserve which are ‘the worst heart and greatest rascal now living’—yet with all this he continues to correspond with him. Such, in this Prince, is the lust of praise from a great and elegant writer; in which, however, he will at last be the dupe: for, by what I hear of Voltaire’s character, he may dissemble but never can or will forgive the King of Prussia for what has passed between them.

  The English did not want Frederick to make peace with Versailles until the French were willing to give up all pretensions to ‘the land of the cod and the beaver’ (Canada). Though he launched a few tentative overtures to be passed on to Choiseul by Voltaire, he always said he would not make peace without the consent of the English and he certainly divulged no secrets. The correspondence at this time still consisted mostly of Voltaire scolding away about the occurrences at Frankfurt, with Frederick good-naturedly putting his own side of the affair. But he got tired of Mme Denis and her alleged sufferings: ‘Let me hear no more of this niece who bores me and who has not, like her uncle, got the qualities of her faults. People still speak of Molière’s cook, but nobody will remember Voltaire’s niece.’

  Qualified observers thought it improbable that Frederick and his army could survive the campaign of 1760 and he himself would not have betted very much on it. He had a shock when a Prussian force under General von Finck, which he had sent in pursuit of the enemy near Maxen, laid down its arms without firing a shot. Prince Henry and his set said it was Frederick’s fault for giving Finck an impossible task, but many people saw it as the beginning of Prussian demoralization. ‘The whole boutique is going to the devil’, Frederick said. Daun, from the vantage-point of Dresden, was determined to conquer Saxony; the Russian tidal wave was again pounding towards Berlin and Loudon was waiting to join another Russian army in Silesia with only Prince Henry and an army well under strength to prevent him. Frederick tried in vain to retake Dresden and, in a desperate mood now, his back to the wall, he subjected the town to a cruel bombardment which shocked the civilized world. In vain. Then he heard that Glatz had fallen to Loudon. He said he would be crushed either that month or the next and it mattered not which. ‘God is on the side of the big battalions.’ Sir Andrew Mitchell burnt his papers; the end seemed near.

  Frederick was so ill from gout and haemorrhoids that he had to
be carried about ‘like a sacred relic’, but he was on the move the whole summer. As always with him there were moments of jollity. He passed through Meissen where the workmen at the china factory were very fond of him—they came out and serenaded him with their band. He designed a dinner service for d’Argens, with four dozen of everything, and sent presents to Mme de Camas, Fouqué and other old friends. Prince Henry was still gallantly harrying the huge Russian army in the east of Silesia. As usual they were disorganized; the wretched soldiers used even to go to the Prussian camp to beg a little bread. Their atrocities were so appalling that Frederick wrote to Loudon about them, but the depopulation of a country which paid taxes to him suited the Austrians and they made no attempt to control their ally.

  In August Breslau was besieged by Loudon; Soltikoff, who was to meet him there, was already on his way. Frederick’s commander Tauentzien had only 4,000 men and was encumbered by 9,000 Austrian prisoners; the town was difficult to defend. Loudon sent a message to say better surrender before the barbarians arrive. When this bore no fruit he sent another: if Tauentzien persisted in his obstinacy Loudon would be obliged to put the whole population to the sword, not even sparing the child in its mother’s womb. Tauentzien replied that he was not pregnant. He thought that all these threats probably meant that Loudon was short of ammunition. Training his own guns on the Austrian camp he scored a direct hit on Loudon’s sitting-room, and had the great satisfaction the next morning of seeing that the enemy had vanished. Henry, having marched ninety miles in three days, was upon him, preventing a junction with the hungry Russians. When Tauentzien died thirty years later he was buried on the ramparts of Breslau.

  On 1 August Frederick, knowing nothing of all this, left Meissen to try and relieve Breslau. He was preceded and followed by Daun and his colleague Lacy, so that the Austrians and Prussians looked from afar like one huge army. The whole enterprise seemed hopeless enough at the beginning; when he arrived at Liegnitz to find that Daun, Lacy, Loudon and Soltikoff were waiting for him with their armies it looked desperate. His generals told Mitchell that they only had provisions for four days. Frederick’s camp was in the country outside Liegnitz. On 13 August a drunken Irishman who, with some grudge against the Austrians, had deserted from them, reeled up to the King’s tent and insisted on an audience. It took some time to sober him enough to make him coherent—they gave him gallons of tea and several enemas—but what he wanted to tell the King was that Daun was going to attack him that night. So Frederick quietly moved his soldiers from the camp, leaving peasants to keep the fires burning and a few drummers to make the usual noises, and slept, with the men, in open fields beneath a beautiful starry sky. At daybreak the whole Austrian army under Daun and Loudon launched an attack on the camp he had just left. Loudon was supposed to capture the supply-wagons while Daun was massacring the main army. But he found nobody to massacre; Frederick fell on Loudon’s flank, put 6,000 men out of action and took 4,000 prisoners. When Daun tried to go to Loudon’s rescue he was foiled by Zieten and was unable to form in order of battle. Then he realized the extent of Loudon’s defeat and abandoned the field.

  Frederick survived this battle by a miracle—enemy soldiers shot at him point-blank, his horse was killed and his clothes were torn. The men spent the night clearing the battlefield, assembling the prisoners, putting the wounded into wagons and packing up the booty. Early next morning, in a heat-wave, they were on the march—everybody, even the King and his generals, on foot, so that the slightly wounded could ride. With his handful of exhausted men Frederick put himself between the vast Russian and Austrian armies, and they dared not attack him. The Russians retreated across the Oder, Soltikoff in the usual rage against Daun, and Prince Henry sent his troops to join his brother’s army.

  Henry himself retired to Glogau and sulked for several months. He had differed from Frederick over strategy and thought himself ill-used. He had played a brilliant part in the campaign with the slender means at his disposal (as Frederick was the first to recognize); now with their two armies joined he would be under his brother’s command: it was more than he could endure. Not until the following April did he appear at Frederick’s H.Q., when he was again given a separate command and told to stand on the defensive in Saxony. As usual when Henry tried to pick a quarrel Frederick behaved as if nothing had happened. He wrote lovingly to his brother the whole winter and, in May, wrote to Princess Amelia: ‘Henry performs the impossible. I must say I truly love him. He has wit and ability, both very rare. I depend upon him.’

  In October 1760, 30,000 Russians at the gates of Berlin were repulsed, according to d’Argens who was there, by the citizens and two old, wounded generals in a battle that went on for five days. Finally, the city had to capitulate and was occupied by Russian and Austrian troops. Greatly to everybody’s surprise the Russians, especially the Cossacks, behaved in a perfectly civilized way, while the Austrians committed every crime and horror under the sun. Things would have been even worse had not a worthy republican, the Dutch minister Vanderelst, made strong representations to the Allied generals. D’Argens said it would be impossible to praise the people too much; he always stressed in his letters how splendid the Berliners were—their one thought was for the King. He reassured Frederick about his houses: no damage at Sans Souci or the Potsdam town palace, where Prince Esterhazy was quartered and had taken away no more than a pen, as a souvenir of the Great King. But Charlottenburg was sacked and many pictures stolen, though mercifully not the Enseigne de Gersaint. Cardinal de Polignac’s antiques were smashed but it would be quite easy to mend them again. (Frederick heard that all this damage as well as a filthy mess in the palace had been the work of Saxons.) The Austrians were levying enormous contributions, but the city fathers, particularly the rich and honourable Gotzkowski, seemed to have found a way of paying them. As soon as the enemy thought that Frederick was marching towards Berlin they left the town. Frederick, in the middle of all these anxieties, told d’Argens to go and see Gotzkowski’s pictures which he had heard were very fine. What were they? Answer: a superb collection, including a Titian and a Raphael he had smuggled out of Rome. Gotzkowski owned a china factory which Frederick bought from him after the war.

  On 3 November Frederick, with 44,000 men, defeated Daun with 50,000 at Torgau near Dresden. The battle might easily have been a second Kolin, for Daun was, as usual, holding a first-class defensive position whence, only a year before, he had tried in vain to evict a tiny force under Prince Henry. Before the battle Frederick sent word to the men that he was about to lead them in a desperate enterprise and they promised that they would do their best. His gamble succeeded and the Austrians were driven out of Saxony, except for Dresden, which they held until the end of the war. Guns were fired in London for Torgau and with it and Liegnitz Frederick recovered his reputation, though he said himself that these battles hardly altered his case, which, after all his campaigns and all his victories, seemed hopeless. His western front was causing him anxiety: the French, having pulled themselves together, had done well that summer against Ferdinand of Brunswick. The King thought that 1761 must bring the end: ‘Everything seems as black as if I were at the bottom of the tomb.’

  Maupertuis died. D’Argens said his ghost had appeared to him and that he had besought it to go off and tease Arouet de Voltaire and suck his blood. Frederick wrote to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha: ‘I have lost all my friends and old acquaintances—philosophy can’t cure that.’ His letters to her show him at his best: they are simple and modest, with no showing off. Sometimes they are almost love-letters, and she has to rebuke him. He said the luckiest thing that ever happened to him was the hazard which led him to her court. ‘Madame ma Cousine, you rule over my soul.’ He was still under canvas when the snows came. Then he wrote and begged M. and Mme d’Argens to meet him at Leipzig for the winter—it was an age since he had had anybody to talk to. D’Argens said, ‘Of course, on a stretcher if necessary’, but he must go home again in March—he was always ill about the middle
of that month when the humours rushed to his bowels. He knew the King’s indifference to health but H.M. would admit that a glorious death on the battlefield is very different from being carried off by diarrhoea.

  The King had a pleasant winter in the Apel House, Leipzig, with d’Argens, Mitchell and Quintus Icilius for company. Mitchell, who had learnt German and was interested in it, encouraged him to meet the professors at the university and there was much conversation about this language and its future, in which Frederick did not believe. He read a great deal and decided that Candide was the only novel one could read over and over again.

  D’Argens’s first-hand account of the looting and smashing and filthy goings-on in Charlottenburg by Saxon soldiers rankled with Frederick. He wrote to Augustus III in Poland about it but had no reply. So he decided to retaliate by emptying Augustus’s favourite shooting-lodge, Hubertusburg, and selling the contents in aid of his own field hospitals. He sent for General Saldern, who had distinguished himself by packing up the battlefield at Liegnitz in record time, and ordered him to take a detachment and pack up at Hubertusburg. Saldern, very much embarrassed, asked to be excused. The King explained that the only way to make the great ones of this earth realize when they had behaved badly was to pull their hair. Saldern said he could not do it. The King furiously left the room and Saldern left the army (though after the war he returned and Frederick regarded him as his best infantry general). So Quintus Icilius was sent to do the job; the King never let him hear the end of it, chaffing him mercilessly about the huge amount he was supposed to have embezzled during the operation.