Chapter III: Frederick the Great (2)

There is a sameness in the course of the Seven Years’ War, which in some measure detracts from its interest. The contending armies held nearly the same positions in 1759, when the campaign opened, as had been the case in 1758, and their relative strength was nearly in the same proportions. The French, under Contades and De Broglie, invaded Hanover from the Rhine and the Main; they were opposed as before by Prince Ferdinand, and though De Broglie gained some success at Bergen--the first and last smile of fortune in this war on France--they were ultimately defeated with heavy loss at Minden--a day memorable for the bravery of the British contingent, and for the incapacity of Lord George Sackville--and they fell back discomfited behind the Rhine. In Central Germany, Frederick was again in Silesia and Prince Henry once more in Saxony; Daun was outside Bohemia and the Silesian frontier, and the forces of the small German States on the Saxon plains; and the Russians who, after Zorndorf, had returned to their steppes, were still hundreds of miles distant, and had not even drawn near the Vistula. Apart from the French and Prince Ferdinand’s armies, Frederick had still perhaps 120,000 men to oppose to 200,000 or 220,000; but as had happened in the two preceding campaigns, he was not inferior in force, where he was in supreme command, for the Russians were, for some months, outside the immediate sphere of action. In these circumstances he might once more have attempted to strike a weighty blow at Daun, and Napoleon condemns him for missing the chance; but the Prussian army had suffered immense losses, and was now crowded with ill-trained levies; and he deserves less censure for this inaction than in the campaign of 1758. Several weeks were spent in small operations, which show that the strength of the King had begun to decline; he attempted nothing resembling a decisive movement, and the war languished on the space between the Elbe and the Oder. Meanwhile his enemies had, for the first time, formed something of a real combination against him. The Empress Elizabeth was savage at the defeat of Zorndorf; Maria Theresa had not changed, and a Russian army, fully 70,000 strong, led by Soltykoff, a true Muscovite, was directed to join hands with the main Austrian army, and to try to crush Frederick with overwhelming numbers. Soltykoff having crossed the Vistula about the middle of May, was upon the Oder in the first days of August, having routed a Prussian body of troops on his march; Daun, meanwhile, had despatched Loudon from Silesia to aid the Russian chief, and their united armies, about 80,000 strong, had soon effected their junction near Frankfort. Frederick had advanced, to parry the blow, to the Oder, with perhaps 40,000 or 45,000 men, and the hostile forces encountered each other at Kunersdorf, close to Frankfort, upon the 12th of August. The battle is chiefly remarkable for the characteristic stubbornness and tenacity of the Muscovite infantry. Frederick’s manœuvres gained some success at first; indeed, Soltykoff was nearly forced into the Oder, but his men rallied behind a line of entrenchments, and the Prussians recoiled, hopelessly beaten, from the bloodstained defences. The King lost a third of his army, and nearly all his guns, and was with difficulty able to get across the Oder.

The situation of Frederick after Kunersdorf was critical in the extreme, and might have been made desperate. Daun, obeying Maria Theresa’s orders, had advanced from Silesia towards the lower Oder; and, when informed of the results of the battle, he moved slowly to Triebel on the Neisse, about six marches distant from the victorious army. Had Soltykoff and Daun now combined their movements, and cordially acted in real concert, they could have opposed fully 120,000 men, in a central position, to Prince Henry and to Frederick and his beaten army; and as the Prussian forces were widely divided, and could not have been 80,000 strong, not to speak of the demoralization of defeat, Daun and Soltykoff ought to have crushed their enemy. The discords and jealousies of a Coalition, as has often happened, perhaps, saved the King and his fortunes at this perilous juncture. The Austrian and Russian generals disliked each other; the policy of their Courts had already begun to diverge on the question of the Turkish Empire; and Soltykoff was indignant that he had been joined only by the detachment sent forward by Daun under Loudon. The Russians and Austrians did not unite, as was quite possible, about the 25th of August, and Frederick turned this brief respite to the best advantage. His shattered army was reinforced by levies from the north; the artillery he had lost was replaced from Berlin; and he was soon at the head of 40,000 men, while Prince Henry had thrown himself, with no ordinary daring, between the two hostile armies. Daun fell back towards Saxony in the first days of September, completely giving up the object of the campaign; before long Soltykoff was in full retreat, and had recrossed the Vistula by the approach of winter; and thus Kunersdorf proved an all but barren victory; Frederick had once more escaped from the toils, and the two Empresses saw their projects frustrated.

The campaign, nevertheless, was a losing one to the King, and it terminated in a very great disaster. During the time when he had been compelled to move to the Oder, in order to face the Russians, the army of the small German states, with some aid from Daun, had taken the offensive upon the Elbe; and, after capturing Torgau and Wittenberg, it had laid siege to Dresden towards the end of August, the city, it will be recollected, having been in the hands of the Prussians since 1756, and being their main depôt and place of arms. The attack had been unsuccessful until the news of Kunersdorf reached the commandant, with a letter from the King, empowering him to treat and to withdraw the garrison; the capitulation was signed in the first days of September, and the portal of Bohemia and the main strategic point of Saxony were thus permanently lost to Frederick, who stormed in vain against his ill-used subordinate. The fall of Dresden was a great reverse, but it was followed by a still greater misfortune. The King, after the failure of the allied armies to join hands, had remained in observation for a time on the Oder; but towards the close of October he fell ill, and for some weeks he was unable to do anything. Prince Henry, meanwhile, had followed the movements of Daun, and had marched into Saxony; and a series of petty operations followed, which are not worthy of special notice. By November, Frederick, himself again, had marched into Saxony and approached Dresden; and, with a want of perception difficult to understand, he committed a mistake, in Napoleon’s judgment the most inexcusable of his chequered career. Daun was at the head of his army in Saxony; a large Austrian garrison was in Dresden; and there was no reason to imagine that this resolute soldier was contemplating a retrograde movement. The King, however, took it into his head that his adversary was about to retreat into Bohemia; and always despising Daun, spite of Kolin and Hochkirch, he sent off 12,000 men from the main army to intercept the supposed movement. The officer in command protested in vain; Daun closed on his foe in irresistible force; and the whole Prussian detachment, hemmed in and powerless, was compelled ignominiously to lay down its arms. Napoleon’s remarks on the surrender of Maxen possess lasting and peculiar interest for the generation that has witnessed Metz and Sedan.

The third phase of the struggle had now come; Frederick, superior in force until the summer of 1757, was henceforward wholly over-matched by his enemies. The symptoms of decline which had become apparent in the strength of Prussia in 1759 had been greatly aggravated by late events; the losses at Kunersdorf and Maxen had been immense; Frederick had been deprived of some of his best lieutenants, and the magnificent army with which he had begun the war had been reduced to a mere skeleton. On the other hand, his obstinate resistance had exasperated his foes; even the listless and worthless Louis XV., notwithstanding the terrible reverses of France in Canada, in Hindustan, and upon every sea, began to be ashamed of defeats on the Rhine and the Weser; and Maria Theresa and Elizabeth continued united in their thirst for vengeance. The Coalition made gigantic efforts to bring the unequal contest to a close; France placed 140,000 men on the Main and the Rhine; in Silesia Loudon had 50,000; Daun was at the head of 80,000 troops of the Empress-Queen and the lesser German States, encamped round Dresden and in the Saxon plains; and Soltykoff commanded 70,000 Russians directed from the Vistula to attain the Oder. To resist these immense masses, the most numerous that had ever been seen in arms in Europe, Frederick could only oppose Prince Ferdinand and 70,000 men to the French army, twofold in numbers; and though he was still subsidised by the gold of Pitt, and he had a central position between his foes, he had not more than 100,000 men, composed largely of mere recruits, to contend with the great Russian and Austro-German armies. The eagles seemed to be gathering on their intended prey, but Frederick had resources in himself and in the patriotic nation he ruled which the Coalition had not taken into account. His fierce, determined, and heroic nature exhibited itself in its grandest aspect; extreme as his peril was, he had no thought of yielding; his centralized and severe government still drew men and supplies from his half-ruined kingdom, and his people, proud of their renowned Sovereign, strained every nerve to fight to the last.

The opening of the campaign of 1760 seemed to portend the speedy ruin of the King; Loudon forced a Prussian detachment 10,000 strong to surrender at Landshut, in Silesia, a repetition of the disaster at Maxen; and Frederick vainly attempted to lay siege to Dresden, an operation as unwise as the siege of Olmütz, which Daun frustrated without difficulty, but which, had he been a great general, he ought to have rendered all but fatal. By this time Loudon had captured Glatz, and was overrunning the Silesian plains; the King, anxious about the annexed province, which Maria Theresa burned to reconquer, set off from Saxony by forced marches; but Daun followed on a parallel line, and in the second week of August, he had nearly joined Loudon, and closed round Frederick and his much weaker army. At daybreak on the 15th, Loudon attacked Frederick at Liegnitz, near the stream of the Katzbach, the army of Daun being almost in sight; but the double movement was ill-combined, and the King extricated himself, and even gained a victory. His position, however, was still most critical, and had Soltykoff, who had approached the Oder, co-operated with the Austrian chiefs, the King, humanly speaking, must have succumbed. Prince Henry, however, again interposed--a mere demonstration proved sufficient; the jealousies of the Allies did the rest; and Soltykoff, instead of striking down Frederick, merely marched northwards and plundered Berlin, a diversion that proved of no importance. The King, saved from destruction, returned into Saxony; the armies of Loudon and Daun diverged; and while Loudon remained in Silesia, Daun followed his adversary with the main army, and took a position at Torgau, on the Elbe. Frederick attacked Daun on the 3rd of November, assailing him at once in flank and front. The attack he conducted in person completely failed; but Ziethen retrieved the fortunes of the day, and the Austrian army was at last defeated. The “hind doomed to death” was not yet to die, and, after many vicissitudes and a marvellous escape, Frederick still held his own between the Elbe and the Oder. Meanwhile, as usual, the great French army had invaded Germany, and had accomplished nothing; Prince Ferdinand, as heretofore, had held it in check.

I shall pass rapidly over the last scenes of the internecine and protracted contest. The situation of Frederick in 1761 was much the same as in the year before, save that the process of exhaustion had told more on his resources than on those of his enemies. The French Court made really great efforts to repair the humiliation of four years of reverses; it put on foot a magnificent army of not less than 160,000 men, a force, Napoleon has remarked, sufficient to have conquered Germany if properly led; but its chief was the worthless Soubise; and baffled and out-manœuvred by Prince Ferdinand, it returned to its winter quarters without winning a battle. On the true theatre of war in Germany the King was again immensely inferior in force; he had probably less than 100,000 men against 220,000 or 250,000; but these last, as always, were widely divided. The two Empresses recurred to the project which had all but succeeded in 1759. Daun, who had been severely wounded at Torgau, was left in Saxony to confront Prince Henry, and Loudon, now the real chief of the Austrian armies, advanced from Silesia, to unite with Boutourline, a new commander of the Russian forces. The King, utterly outnumbered, had recourse to the antiquated and barbarous method of wasting whole tracts to keep back Loudon; but the Austrian general made his way to the Oder; and, having left a detachment to besiege Schweidnitz, he effected his juncture with Boutourline’s army at Jauer, near Liegnitz, at the close of August. Frederick entrenched himself within defensive lines, after the fashion of the preceding century; he had lost the initiative, and waited on his foes, and he was ere long surrounded in his camps at Bunzelwitz by enemies nearly fourfold in numbers. Loudon, a real general, was eager to storm the lines, and, Napoleon thinks, must have destroyed the King had Boutourline concurred in the attack; but Muscovite jealousy interfered once more, and the Russian commander stiffly refused to support his colleague, and marched northwards. Frederick escaped, as had often happened, by a kind of marvel; meanwhile, Daun had remained inactive in Saxony, and the only results of a campaign which should have overwhelmed Prussia were that the Russians established themselves on the Baltic, ready for speedier operations in the following year, and that Loudon captured the great place of Schweidnitz, the key, as it has been called, of Silesia.

1762 was the last year of the war, and as it opened the prospects of the King had never seemed to be so gloomy and hopeless. The circle of his enemies was narrowing round him; Daun and a powerful army held possession of Saxony and the line of the Elbe; Loudon occupied Silesia in great force; the Russians were preparing to march from Kolberg; and the French had 100,000 men in the heart of Germany. Frederick thought that the end had at last come; yet, unshaken by the approach of the tempest, he confronted it with heroic constancy, and like a lion who marks the advance of the hunters, he moved hither and thither with the wrecks of his armies, watching an opportunity to strike with effect, and determined to challenge fortune to the last. As had always happened in the Seven Years’ War, the French operations completely failed, and Frederick contrived to recruit his forces with 20,000 Germans in the Austrian service, unwisely disbanded at this supreme moment. Yet these gleams of success appeared extinguished by an event that portended complete ruin; the fall of Pitt in detaching England from Prussia, and depriving her of her only ally, made the cause of the King apparently hopeless. Nevertheless, his grand strength of character was justly recompensed, and at the eleventh hour a series of strange incidents changed the whole state of affairs in Europe. The Empress Elizabeth suddenly died; her successor, Peter, became an ally of the King; and though Catherine, his murderess, who seized his crown, did not adopt the policy of her late husband, Russia withdrew finally from the Coalition. This became the signal of the dissolution of the League; France, disgraced and defeated all over the globe, made an ignominious peace with England and Prussia; and Maria Theresa, left isolated, and threatened by the Turk, the old foe of Austria, was compelled sullenly to give up the contest. The last event of the war was the recapture of Schweidnitz by the Prussian army; Frederick had successfully withstood the Great Powers of the Continent, and all that Austria, that Russia, that France had done had not even wrested Silesia from his hands.

A few weeks after the Peace of Hubertsburg, the King and his army entered Berlin in triumph. The pageant was very different from that witnessed in 1866 and in 1871, when Prussia had driven Austria from her high place in Germany, and had annihilated the military power of France. The magnificence of war was not to be seen; splendid troops did not line the squares and the streets; there was no procession of superb trophies attesting a series of amazing victories. The army which had begun the contest had well-nigh perished; its ranks were filled by men not of the stock of Brandenburg; its standards in rags, and its war-worn aspect attested the vicissitudes and defeats of a long and uncertain struggle. Yet the spectacle was one of enduring interest, big with great results in a far distant future. That army, made up of many elements from different parts of the great German race, like Wallenstein’s army of a century before, embodied, however feebly, the as yet vague idea that Germany was a nation of one blood and language; and it was the precursor of the patriotic league which rose and fought for Germany in 1813–14, and of the gigantic hosts which, in our day, conquered the unity of Germany at Sadowa and Sedan. Frederick had no sympathy with what, in his time, was merely a dream of a few enthusiasts; in taste and thought he was through life a Frenchman, and he never really looked beyond Prussian interests, yet he was the second Arminius of the Teutonic race, and the Seven Years’ War was a new era for Germany. For many years, however, his own energy, and those of his people, were engrossed in efforts to repair the appalling ruin which had befallen his kingdom. Prussia was a land of desolation when he sheathed his sword; her population had diminished a tenth; her youth, equal to war, had been reduced one sixth; savage hordes from the East had overrun her provinces; every town was darkened with tokens of mourning; Silesia had more than one silent and deserted village. The Government, too, had become more despotic in the course of the war than it had ever been; the pressure of arbitrary taxation was frightful; a prying Inquisition had entered the homes of all, and, as has been said, “everything that was not military violence was anarchy.”

Yet the King was never before so revered by his subjects, and he remained the object of their love and esteem in an age when, in the decay of loyalty, every throne of the Continent was being undermined. This profound national sentiment was partly due to the real merits of the King as a ruler, but mainly, no doubt, to the patriotic pride of the martial and ambitious people of Prussia, which has never ceased to boast that, under its Great Frederick, it defeated the armed strength of three-fourths of Europe. This legend, indeed, is to a great extent a fable; the “miraculous,” as Napoleon has said, disappears upon an impartial survey of Frederick’s exploits in the Seven Years’ War. For many months he was superior in force on the theatre; Austria, all through, was his only determined enemy; Russia was too distant to act with effect, and had a real interest not to weaken Prussia; and France either did not put forth her force, or--the Bellona of Europe--committed the weapons of Condé and Turenne to Soubise and Clermont, in their hands the darts of an impotent Priam. Even as it was, too, on more than one occasion the King must have been overwhelmed and ruined but for the dissensions of the Coalition; and it was his peculiar good fortune that, if we except Loudon--and this able and brilliant chief held high command for a few months only--he had to cope with generals of the third order. Yet admitting all this, and recollecting besides the many military shortcomings of the King--and his errors were sometimes of the gravest kind--still his achievements are justly held by Prussia as a glorious possession above price; they remain, and will for ever remain, a grand monument of what constancy, decision, and energy can accomplish against odds which appeared impossible to resist.

After the termination of the Seven Years’ War, Frederick never fought a battle again. He was threatened, indeed, in 1775, by an Austrian invasion to regain Silesia; and in 1778 the Emperor Joseph arrayed a great army against Prussia, to assert his claims to a part of Bavaria. These hostilities, however, came to nothing, and the King was allowed, during a long space of time, to carry out the policy he had laid down for himself. It was a policy of craft and ambition abroad; and Frederick, in his fixed purpose of enlarging Prussia, was a chief author of the partition of Poland, a crime shared by Catherine, and even by Maria Theresa--the conscience of the last was, however, stung--and the cause of unnumbered woes to Europe. His domestic policy remained one of enlightened despotism, of equal laws and of strong government, of arbitrary, but tolerably just, rule; and his kingdom recovered within a short time from most of the effects of the Seven Years’ War, and made rapid strides in wealth and prosperity. The King was justly deemed the first sovereign of his age; but the three accomplices in the destruction of Poland suffered cruelly for a great national wrong; but for this, Revolution would have been quelled in France in 1792 and 1793; but for this, Austria would not have bled at Austerlitz, and Prussia and Russia mourned for Jena and Friedland. Though the centralized government of Frederick, too, seemed a masterpiece of wisdom and power, it proved unable to stand the strain of ill fortune, and it perished with the renowned Prussian army in the agony of 1806–7. Frederick died peacefully in 1786, having survived nearly all the sovereigns of his time. One of his last acts was to form a league against the pretensions of Imperial Austria; but he was utterly unconscious that a tempest was at hand which was to destroy the monarchies of the eighteenth century, and to create a new Prussia out of the wrecks of the old.

I turn to my immediate subject. What is the place of the King among great commanders? Frederick had not supreme original genius; he was deficient in imagination, and often in judgment; but he had a powerful mind, intensely quick perception, activity and perseverance beyond praise; and he was endowed, besides, with a force of character and a steadfastness seldom bestowed on man. These qualities made him the greatest captain of an age wanting in masters of the art; and he accomplished wonders, spite of his many faults, with an army infinitely the best in Europe. As a strategist, he stands low in the second order; his ideas were occasionally sound and brilliant, but the plans of his campaigns were, for the most part, bad; and he had not the faculty of those great combinations which disclose real strategic genius. Holding, as he usually did, a central position between enemies widely apart, he would repeatedly have defeated them in detail had he possessed the science and the gifts of Turenne; and had he had to cope, not with the Lorraines and the Dauns, but with the general of Castiglione and Rivoli, he would have been struck down over and over again, as the result of his false and ill-directed movements. His place as a tactician is much higher. Frederick had real insight and skill on the field; he possessed a great deal of Marlborough’s power of detecting the vulnerable points of an enemy, and of striking at them until success was attained, and his favourite manœuvre, when properly understood, is an illustration of the great principle that you should always so place your troops on the ground as to turn it to the best advantage, and to make the most of their powers upon it. Yet the King had not Marlborough’s unerring skill; even as a tactician he made great mistakes. He was deservedly beaten at Kolin and Hochkirch; he had the great fault of sometimes losing his temper. There is a bad mannerism in his conduct of battles, and more than once he completely ignored the conditions under which, and under which alone, the attack in oblique order could be risked or justified. The title of Frederick to rank among the first of warriors depends less, in fact, upon his intellectual faculties than upon his grand and extraordinary moral qualities, tenacity, and marvellous strength of character; no general has surpassed him in the rare gift of overcoming difficulties, and escaping from peril; no general, not even Arthur Wellesley, has confronted a huge superiority of force with more calmness and firmness of purpose; no general, not even his countryman Blücher, a subaltern in the Seven Years’ War, has excelled him in rising above defeat, and in mastering an enemy who had seemed secure in victory. If Napoleon says truly--and who can doubt it?--that a strong nature is the greatest gift of a chief, Frederick is eminent among the masters of war.