Chapter II: Frederick the Great and the Grand Coalition (1)

FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE GRAND COALITION

An Abstract for the Hour

Well, where shall I begin? The writer of history--and in this case the historical essayist as well--is always subject to the temptation to which Wagner so magnificently succumbed when, with no more in view than the presentation of his hero’s downfall, he found himself lured by a pedantic enthusiasm deeper and deeper into his folktale, and urged to include a larger and larger area of his background, until at last he fetched up against the first beginnings and origins of all things; and there, at the lowest E of the prelude to the prelude, he solemnly and almost soundlessly set to. But both space and time vigorously protest against my following Wagner’s example in this sketch of the origins of a war, the repetition--or continuation--of which we are seeing today. Rather let me be strict with myself; and since I must begin somewhere, let me make my beginning with the profound mistrust, the deep-seated and, to be quite fair, the rather well-founded mistrust felt by all the world for Frederick II of Prussia.

Consider: here is a young man, boyish of feature, elegantly built, if rather plump, “the nicest little creature in the kingdom,” a stranger said of him; fresh-coloured, chubby-cheeked, with large, short-sighted, sparkling blue eyes and a nose that made a straight line with his forehead and had a naïve little rosy tip. And this nice young man is a crown prince, with a perfectly well-known past that has been somewhat dissipated and by turns alarming and alarmed; by way of being a _libre-penseur_ too, a pert young philosopher and littérateur, author of the highly humanistic _Antimachiavelli_. He is totally unmilitary, so far as can be seen, a civilian of the civilians, even effeminate; runs up bills, and has his heart set on the pomps and vanities. And now this young man becomes king--having proved so devoid of honourable feeling as not to have been provoked by any cudgellings or neck-twistings on the part of his fearsome papa to put a bullet through his brain or even to resign in his brother’s favour. And as king so conducts himself that nobody knows what to think. The day that he ascended the throne went for ever after by the name “_La journée des dupes_.” Almost everything turned out contrary to expectations. Those who had trembled before the revenge of the new master were not punished, while those who dreamed that their day had come found themselves disillusioned. The poets and fortune-hunters who swarmed round the throne and could not huzza loud or long enough, visibly drew in their horns; and a jolly fellow from Rheinsberg, who knew no better than to strike up confidently in the key of former days, received a sparkling blue glance and the cutting words: “_Monsieur, à présent je suis roi._” In other words, the joke is played out. It is precisely the scene in Shakespeare, perhaps the finest in the whole of him, where somebody, with just such a look, says to somebody else: “I know thee not, old man.”

Some things which the youth does in his very first days of power have literary _habitus_, are rather high-handed and self-assertive. He abolishes the torture--so much the better for the thieves! He declares that the gazettes need not be afraid to be a little amusing, they will not be prosecuted; and annuls the censorship (and puts it back a year later). He proclaims religious toleration--that is his much-talked-of enlightenment, of course. But what has become of that dream of Parnassus, that court of the muses, where fashion and wit should reign and all be careless, voluptuous, and gallant? It is nowhere at all. The new lord turns out to be, of all things in the world, a rigid economist. No rise in the pay of officials. No reduction of the high tariffs, however much certain people may have counted on relief. The chancelleries of the kingdom are notified that the financial system of his dear departed Majesty will continue strictly in force. Finance-Minister Boden, a much-hated skinflint, remains in office. There is no such thing as trust, or easy-going, or _laissez-aller_. Everybody is watched as never before. And Baron von Pöllnitz actually said, with a sigh: “I’d give a hundred pistoles to have the old man back again!”

No revolutionary changes of system, then. No loosening of the reins of government, no new faces in the Ministry. But one thing, at least, will surely be different: this is a civilian of civilians who reigns, he stands for literature and silk dressing-gowns and a definite end to Potsdam militarism. Surely the corporal’s baton has gone out of fashion! Well, just here everybody gets the greatest surprise of all. The slack and rather sensual young philosopher comes out as an impassioned soldier: he has no thought of weakening the military basis of the State. Weaken it? He strengthens the army by fifteen battalions, five squadrons of hussars (introduced on the Austrian model), and a squadron of _gardes du corps_, bringing it up to a round ninety thousand men. The uniform once cursed and jeered at he is never seen out of. His conservatism extends to the retention of all the existing military ranks. “The army organization is a monument of His Majesty our dearly beloved father’s wisdom in government; it is, in essentials, not to be tampered with.” A few barbarities in the recruiting system are done away with: the flogging of cadets, maltreating the common man, have to be frowned on for his credit’s sake. But that is all. What seems to need change is the _meaning_ of the institution, the spirit in which it is employed--its political significance, in short. And just here is the suspicious thing.

The military had been something like a foible of the deceased sovereign, a barbaric and rather costly fad, a laughing-stock at all the courts of Europe, where it had never weighed in the scale of affairs. All at once it becomes “the power of the State”--Frederick’s phrase in one of his first letters as ruler--a curiously practical conception, further borne out by the way he sets to work to purge the establishment of the quaint flourishes it had as a fad of the deceased King. The regiment of giants, a sight worth looking at, but not good for much else, is done away with, appears for the last time at the funeral ceremonies of Frederick William. Only a battalion of grenadier guards is left, for the sake of filial piety. “The power of the State.” Prussia’s representatives at foreign courts begin suddenly to speak a language that makes one doubt one’s ears. Prussia takes the stage; Prussia unmistakably means to be treated as the not negligible entity she really is. Her astonishing young king behaves as though Prussia were not so much a state of the German empire as a European one. He lets it be known that he is not minded for ever to span the bow and never to let it go, as Europe has long mocked at Prussia for doing.

But what shall we make of all this? Had he been a comedian all this time? Count Seckendorff once wrote about him to Vienna when he was still crown prince: “His greatest fault is his dissimulation and falseness, which makes it necessary to exercise the very greatest caution in what one tells him.” Yes, that is evidently true. Seckendorff goes on: “He told me he was a poet, he could write a hundred lines in an hour. And a musician too, a moral philosopher, a physicist, a mechanic. What he never will be is a statesman or a commander-in-chief.” Looked at from this end, it seems as though the young man had deliberately dissimulated in this respect as well. For the last surprise is the greatest of all; for the first time it betrays what is actually to be expected of him.

Frederick has not been on the throne for half a year when Charles VI dies; and scarcely is the Emperor below ground when Frederick, to the great consternation of his own ministers, generals, and relatives and the rest of the world as well, lays some sort of claim to Silesia. By the letter of the law and by virtue of solemn compacts, the claim is wholly unfounded; or, if you like, founded on the divers acts of perfidy and presumption which Brandenburg has had from time immemorial to endure from Austria. In any case it is a claim which Frederick, unless Maria Theresa acquiesces, and that she cannot possibly do, is prepared to maintain with the sword. “Everything is in readiness,” he writes to Algarotti; “I have only to put into effect the plans I have had a long time in my head.” A long time? And everything in readiness? Without saying a word to a soul? Without betraying by the smallest sign that he had such ideas in his head? Well, he has certainly been a dissembling, reserved, solitary young man, all the conviviality on the Remusberg to the contrary notwithstanding! To Voltaire, on the other hand, he writes: “The Emperor’s death upset all my peaceful ideas.” This in order that Voltaire in France might not suppose that the attack had been a matter of long preparation. Oh, a young man both particularly solitary and particularly sly!

However, there it is: Frederick invades the imperial domains--he, Margrave of Brandenburg, who, as hereditary arch-chamberlain, has had to hand the wash-basin to Maria Theresa’s ancestors. “_C’est un fou, cet homme là est fol_,” said Louis XV, who after all must have known something about the game of politics. A piece of bravado, a perfectly reckless beginning, says all Europe. And the English Minister in Vienna is even then of the opinion that Frederick ought to be outlawed.

But bravado or no--Austria is in bad form, things turn out well for Frederick. There is the battle of Mollwitz, where he is beaten and takes to his heels for ten miles, while Schwerin comes up and wins the day for him. Not a glorious day for the King, but a victory none the less. Then Bavaria has hankerings after the imperial crown, France supports her, Austria is hard pressed. On top of that comes Chotusitz, where Buddenbrock throws the Austrians into the burning village; and Maria Theresa, who would rather lose a whole province to Bavaria than a single village to Prussia (she hates this Frederick with the whole strength of her femininity), must, anguish in her white bosom, tears in her blue eyes, sign a peace that assures to the King Upper and Lower Silesia and the Duchy of Gratz. He has them, they are his.

What else? A round two years have passed when Frederick makes war again--ostensibly as an elector of the realm to bring succour to the hard-pressed Bavarian emperor, but actually because Maria Theresa has meanwhile been rather too successful against France and Bavaria, and Frederick suspects that when she has finished with the others she will turn round and take Silesia away from him again: beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten Silesia--she bursts into tears whenever she hears it mentioned. And she is not without powerful friends: for instance, King George II of England, conqueror of the French and ally of the Empress-queen since Worms, 1734. King George wrote to her in these very words: “_Madame, ce qui est bon à prendre est bon à rendre_”--the letter fell into Frederick’s hands. England and Austria have helped each other defend the territories which each had possessed up to 1739. Up to 1739? That was, to be sure, before Frederick took Silesia. And there are similar pacts entered into between Austria and Saxony. The Austrian historians call heaven to witness that the Empress had not at that time planned any attack, but it was enough for Frederick. He stood very well with France: since June he had had with Richelieu a twelve-year offensive alliance; he is not without diplomatic safeguards. In these two years he has increased the “power of the State” by eighteen thousand “moustaches,” as Voltaire called them; greatly strengthened and rebuilt the Silesian fortresses; and in the middle of the summer of ’44 he strikes again, without even declaring war; falls upon Bohemia eighty thousand strong, marches through Saxony without even asking the Elector’s leave, marches toward Prague, marches actually against Vienna.

It is heavy going. Now and then things look desperate. Charles of Lorraine hurls himself from Alsace into Bohemia and threatens Frederick’s Silesian connexions; the Saxon army has the King in the rear--there is an awkward retreat, due to several foolish decisions on Frederick’s part, by his own later confession--he learned much from them. By the next year his generalship shows itself devilishly improved! Soor follows on Hohenfriedberg; after he has annihilated the Saxons at Kesselsdorf, Count Harrach comes as broker to Dresden, and Maria Theresa confirms the cession of Silesia, while Frederick recognizes her husband, the gallant Francis of Lorraine, as German emperor. Why not?--Charles VII is dead, and Frederick never set great store by him anyhow.

But why does he make peace with Habsburg? Because he sees that fortune has been with France in the Netherlands, and so, for the present, the Empress-queen’s preponderance is not very great. Also, to the huge dissatisfaction of France, he makes peace with England too, withdraws with his booty--Silesia--and sagely resists for the next three years--for so long does the War of the Pragmatic Sanction go on between France and Austria supported by the sea powers--all attempts to draw him out of his neutrality. By the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which finally brought the struggle to an end in favour of Maria Theresa, he gets his Silesian “acquisition” expressly guaranteed.

But one thing we must say: if the Silesian “acquisition” be considered robbery, a piece of property snatched in defiance of justice--and people did so consider it, and so it was--then they should not have solemnly guaranteed it to the robber. That they did so guarantee it meant that they left it to time to right the wrong (as time can do) and that Europe and Maria Theresa from then on renounced all machinations and conspiracies against the robber, and accepted the _fait accompli_. But this they did not do, Maria Theresa in particular did not do it. She did not abandon the hope that she might yet get Silesia back, despite the Peace of Aix; and that is a black mark against the name of that splendid, simple, high-hearted woman, who was otherwise so deserving of all the interest and sympathy she got from Europe. But why was it that Europe--or its courts and governments--never felt easy on the score of this king? Because of the great mistrust, with which our story began, and which the King repaid with interest. The mistrust was rooted in his fundamentally strange, enigmatic character. Europe knew it to be a danger; and its later manifestations kept her constantly holding her breath.

The fact was that of all the powers who had gone to war over the Pragmatic Sanction, Frederick alone had gained something, had even gained a great deal. That he kept the splendid province was the least of his gains. But this beggarly young Prussia, with its poor two million souls, had measured itself beside, or against, Austria, as an equal; it had squeezed in among the great powers of Europe, and claimed to speak in all their counsels as one of them; it had forced them to reckon with Prussia as a political factor not merely weighty, but even decisive--for Frederick had managed to stage himself in the popular imagination as the balance-wheel of European equilibrium, at least so far as the relations between France and Austria were concerned. Now, it is very hard on Europe to be forced to change its attitude like that. It takes her centuries. She struggles, she scolds, she sneers; she denies the new factor any political, cultural, above all any moral justification, she cannot utter enough spite and venom against the newcomer, she sees nothing but a speedy ruin in store for him; and, if her prophecies do not look like fulfilling themselves with measurable haste, then all the old-established society of states are ready to bury the hatchet of their private quarrels over prestige and interests, however vital, in order to fall on the kill-joy and crush him. She will do that, or try to, twice, if need be, within a hundred and fifty years. Simple people like Frederick’s philosopher friend Jordan, even in the second Silesian war, can never understand why it is that “the accounts in the newspapers are never favourable to us.” Yes, it was strange. But the newspaper accounts could not prevent Frederick from keeping Silesia. And now, at least, with the guarantee safe in his pocket, surely he is satiated and satisfied? Apart from measures taken against him--was he, on his side, well and peacefully minded?

He did not give the impression that he meant to disarm immediately. He kept his army, after the Peace at Dresden, on a footing of a hundred and forty thousand men; there were in addition the “supernumerary troops,” whose strength he doubled, so that he had at his disposition a trained reserve of sixteen thousand men. That made a hundred and fifty-six thousand “moustaches,” an absurd figure for a country of Prussia’s relative rank and economic resources. Louis XV had not so many soldiers, certainly not so many beastly good ones. For Frederick’s army, out of all compass as far as numbers went, was put through its paces in a way that was the talk of Europe.

He made demands, and insisted on performance, with respect to mobility and tactical precision, unheard of in his time. The foreign military gentry who were allowed now and then to look on were amazed--and, even so, they did not get to see the real thing. These masses of troops wheeled and deployed, they developed the famous oblique battle-order, invented by the King, in eight various formations, with a mathematical accuracy that would have made old Prince Eugene, who had once patronized the Prince at Philippsburg, doubt his own eyes. And there reigned throughout a practical spirit which was quite the opposite of amateurish enthusiasm. There were no splendid encampments and display manœuvres, as in other countries, where huge assemblages of troops came together in time of peace and went harmlessly through their exercises. Frederick held manœuvres on a large scale each year at Spandau or Potsdam; and these forced advances over heavy ground, these actions on the plain, these river crossings and assaults, these varied and whole-hearted attacks on the problem of how a superior enemy--it seemed one reckoned with a superior enemy, possibly with a combination of enemies?--can be rolled up on the flank and destroyed; they were all trials of war, in bitter earnest and quite undisguised, carried out with the sole end and aim of visualizing the actual conflict and familiarizing officers and troops with the details of the bloody business. And an aggressive spirit, a purpose of swift and lively action, was inoculated by every possible means into the blood of these troops--contrary to the fashion of the time and bordering on the uncivilized. Frederick had only contempt for the refined methods of making war as practised in his century--those “capital generals, who have spent whole campaigns in various manœuvres, without one being able to get the better of the other--which earned them high praise from the General Staff.” He despised too the entrenched position, which was held in such great regard. Battle, at all costs! Force the enemy to fight; battles must be decisive, that is what they are for. Attack, attack! _Attaquez donc toujours!_ A bayonet charge is his passion, he was the first to regulate the details of its execution. “Don’t shoot more than you need, and, above all, not too soon! At twenty, even ten paces from the enemy, let off a good stiff salvo under his nose and then give it him in the ribs with the bayonet.” Then the cavalry: “The King herewith forbids all officers of cavalry, on pain of disgrace and cassation, ever to let themselves be attacked in any action; for Prussians must always attack the enemy.” At a hand-gallop? No, in full career. “Then, in close formation, they must spur their horses on, at the top of their lungs, as they charge.” “At the top of their lungs.” “Under their noses.” “Give it them in the ribs.” It all sounds so savage, so reckless, so extreme, so inordinate, so violent! The man must be bent on a ruthless offensive and thinking of nothing else. Is it possible for anyone to trust him?

Alas, no, probably not. Probably it was not possible, even if anyone had wanted to--again, quite apart from any measures taken against him! This king was much too secretive and dissembling; reserved even with his intimates, or, rather, he had no intimates. Never to be communicative, never to let anyone guess his thoughts, such was his first principle as a ruler. He stated it quite frankly one day, himself: “If I thought,” he said, “that my shirt or my skin knew anything of my intentions, I would tear them off.” A savage way of putting it--and very expressive of his extreme and obstinate intention to keep his own counsel. What could be accomplished by diplomatic methods, with such a king? The foreign gentlemen found him inscrutable. His moderation, his neutrality, his good intentions--nobody believed in them, and he knew that they did not. He said: “In Vienna they take me for an irreconcilable enemy of the house of Austria; in London they think me far more restless, more ambitious, richer than I am. Bestuchev [the Russian imperial chancellor] believes that I am plotting mischief; in Versailles they say I am falling asleep over my interests. They are all mistaken. But what makes for trouble is that these misapprehensions may have evil consequences. What must be done is to anticipate [?] these consequences, and relieve Europe of her preconception.” _Pre_-conception? Why, it was a _post_-conception, a conception formed after the two Silesian wars. Again, perhaps he was speaking quite sincerely, and merely deceived himself on the score of the danger he himself was to Europe? A puzzle to everybody, was he perhaps one to himself as well?

He led a singular life--it contrasted with any and every monarchical habit of the time. In summer he got up at three o’clock. But three o’clock is the time to go to bed, when God has placed you in a position to enjoy life! Scarcely was his hair combed when he began to govern. Did he govern well? Certainly he governed with a suspiciousness, a self-will, a despotism which could only be called boundless and extravagant, and which entered into everything, the smallest as well as the greatest field, and deprived the work of others of all dignity. He so loved work that he took it all to himself, and left his servants not enough; or, rather, what remained was irksome and petty, and he spied on and scolded and humiliated them even at that. “_Cette race maudite_” (thus, rightly or wrongly, he called the whole of humanity) would, he was convinced, begin to deceive him and defraud the State if it got the least chance; and his complete lack of confidence had at least this much good about it, that his officials had to reckon with the fact that the King would see and examine everything, his subjects might be certain that their complaints and petitions did come before him instead of falling under the table. He never let anything be lost sight of, he gave himself pain over the smallest detail.

Yes, self-willed and despotic he certainly was; up to the most grandiose and down to the pettiest sense of those words. Nobody dared travel without his permission; in granting which, the King decreed the amount of the journey money, down to a farthing: for the burgher so much, for the junker a little more. He awed and astonished all the world by operations that had something superhuman and fantastic about them, such as erecting mighty dams to fight the power of the sea and to wrench from it strips of land which had for centuries been its prey. Or he ploughed the marshes, turned bogs into fields, set ten thousand spades to work to make canals through the swamps of the Oderbruch--callous toward the suffering of his labourers, who might all die off of swamp-fever, so long as they were sacrificed to the future and to his impatient will. If a stranger wanted a good seat at a parade, he had to write to the King, and the King answered in his own hand. Yet it was this very king who one day declared that he would no longer sit silent and endure the obsolete abuses and formalities in the administration of justice; he would mix in and attack the problem himself--and straightway he created the common law of the land, a great and bold reform, a model of reason and fair-mindedness, which all other countries were fain to study and admire.

The army, the administration, service at home and abroad. That was not all. He “mixed into” other matters too, and did not stop with “mixing.” He was his own finance minister (obstinately stingy here; extravagant there, where it was a matter of some large and it might be impossible scheme or other), his own minister for agriculture (who simply refused to believe, because Linnæus and others said so, that the potato was a poisonous plant, and arbitrarily insisted that it be planted), his own minister for commerce (and as such conservative, walking in his father’s footsteps, with prohibited schedules and protection and monopolies, his main idea being that the money should stop in the country), his own minister of works and mines, his own lord chamberlain, and what not besides?--for when a man lives separated from his wife and gets up at three o’clock in the morning, he can get a lot done in the course of the day.

It took a king like this, a man who could work as he could, to show the full meaning of the word “despotism.” Until his time no one had grasped its significance. But the despotism he created was _a new_ kind. He was an enlightened despot--which means that his subjects might think and say what they liked, provided that he, on his side, might do as he chose--an arrangement which it must be admitted was useful to both parties. Religions meant little or nothing to him, he despised them all. Persecuted irreligion found an asylum and even an official status in his kingdom. Lampoons, satires, libels directed against him, moved him not at all. He did not fear brains: his love of them was balanced by his scorn--so long as they were not backed by any power. On being told that one of his subjects had criticized him, he asked: “Has he a hundred thousand men? Then what do you want me to do with him?” Which was cynical, of course. And, indeed, he did have a cynical cast of mind, which betrayed itself even in his dress, that got dirtier and shabbier as time went on; and in the kind of diversions he chose: the habitual blasphemies at his supper parties, the dry, malicious pleasure he had in goading on the literary men and philosophers whom he found in food, in “embroiling” them in disputes and quarrels with each other. Even his mania for work, was there not something cynical, arid, inhuman, misanthropic, about it too, to any healthy and right human sense? For a healthy and right human sense understands--and understood in Frederick’s time too--that career and accomplishment are not all of life; that life has its purely human claims and duties of happiness, to neglect which may be a greater sin than a little easy-goingness toward oneself and others in the matter of one’s work; and again, according to the healthy and right human sense, nobody can be called a harmonious personality who does not understand how to satisfy the just claims of both sides of life. And this king did not, he had no comprehension of these facts, though surely a king ought to know them as well as other people. His insane industry, his insistence on merit and getting things done, was ascetic and somehow horrible in its nature. He hated monks, of course, as he hated all religious and clergy; but he was rather like a monk himself, a monk in a blue soldier coat and yellow waistcoat always spotted with snuff. And he was a cynical old bachelor, and a good share of his ill feeling and his uncanniness had surely to do with his relations with the female sex, which were as a matter of fact no relations at all, and pretty incomprehensible even to his own age, highly capricious as that was in its attitude toward sex matters.

He had been, as I said, rather a dissipated youth. When he was fifteen years old, he visited the luxurious court of Dresden, where he liked it not a little, and fell in love head over ears with the Countess Orselska, the daughter and favourite of Augustus II; but the King, who was somewhat jealous, offered him instead the Countess Formera, a well-shaped damsel, displaying her first in the guise of a living picture. This lady accordingly became Frederick’s first mistress. Afterwards he got hold of the Orselska as well. Such tales are legion: for instance, there is one about the Freifrau von Wreech, whom he used to visit when he was at Küstrin, and who supplied him with candles and books, and even with money, which he is supposed never to have refunded, though Frau von Wreech gave birth to a child which her husband never acknowledged. Then there was the daughter of a Potsdam precentor, who was publicly whipped and sent to the house of correction “for life.” And in Ruppin and Rheinsberg he had his fill of debauchery; but Seckendorff wrote to Prince Eugene that “it seemed the body was not strong enough for the demands made upon it by the desires, and the Crown Prince appears to seek in his dissipations a reputation for gallantry rather than to gratify actual sinful inclinations.” All which might be true and might not. But it is certain that none of these affairs had anything to do with passion in any higher or deeper sense, any more than they had with genuine feeling or warmth of heart. Frederick, when quite young, declared that all he wanted of women was pleasure, and that, having enjoyed, he despised them. He had never been in love. Then came a _malheur_; there is talk of an operation following; and from then on something was broken in his nature. He soon ceased to act the voluptuary; woman had played out her brief and not too honourable rôle in his life.

Misogyny is now deep-seated in his nature. Henceforth one cannot imagine him in any tender situation--it would seem grotesque. His marriage, of course, was no marriage at all; but that does not signify, since it was a forced one. It was not merely that the other sex left him cold. He hated it, he poured scorn on it, he could not endure it anywhere near him. His wife’s ladies complained: “We do not ask that the King should love us; but that he simply cannot stand us--that is hard.” The wife of his hypochondriac friend d’Argens was allowed, as a particular favour, to live in Sans Souci; save for this the palace was a sort of cloister. But a cloister is not quite a natural place to live in. The Italian dancer Barberini passed for some time as the King’s mistress; but Voltaire, on the subject of the relationship, expressed himself thus: “_Il en était un peu amoureux parce qu’elle avait les jambes d’un homme._” So it too was hardly the regular thing. Frederick’s masculinity was obviously not attracted in the orthodox way by the feminine counter-pole. Possibly the long years of soldiering contributed to this state of things and weaned his interests from the other sex. There are many cases of military who were or who became women-haters. This man, brought up in an atmosphere of French femininity, may have grown so accustomed to the maleness of camps that at last he “could not stand the smell” of women. And this was in the Frenchest of centuries, a woman’s century _par excellence_, saturated with the perfume of the _Ewig-Weibliche_. His conception of soldiership, ascetic to begin with (the highest soldier in his command durst not in the field eat off anything but tin), made him so anti-feminine that the soft appeal of love and marriage was quite shut out. He did not like his officers’ marrying, he wanted them to be cloistered warriors like himself; and expressed his view in the witticism he made, that his officers “should find their happiness in the sword and not in the ...” Anyhow, they should find it in the sword. In 1778, out of the seventy-four officers of a regiment of dragoons there was just one married.

Now why was all that? Perhaps at bottom it was not a little political. We must not forget that the most powerful countries in Europe were at that time ruled by women: the Empress Elizabeth, the Empress-queen of Austria, and the Pompadour. Frederick despised and affronted them to the point of political gaucherie. Aloud, at table, before all his lackeys, he called them “the three first wh...s in Europe.” This though he knew, or, rather, because he knew, that no remark of his escaped the spies of foreign courts. In any case, the ugly word may have fitted two of them, but certainly it did not Maria Theresa; in vituperating that chaste and childishly high-minded woman he obviously only levelled at the sex. The Little Mother, Elizabeth, on the other hand, did lay herself open by her weakness for strong drink and muscular military; but these very weaknesses were what kept her a powerful potentate, and it was most injudicious of Frederick to make them the theme of scurrilous little rhymes, which of course came to her ears and made the mistress of Russia his envenomed and everlasting enemy. And why could he not bring himself to the point of a few friendly words with the Pompadour, after she had daintily taken pains to meet him half-way--and considering she was the actual ruler of France? She was only a butcher’s daughter, named Poisson, the wife of a publican and procurer, and herself a procuress to boot. Admitted and conceded, that was what she was. But in the first place, what is the good of being an enlightened despot if you cannot look beyond such small matters? And in the second, she was rather more than delicious, with that clever, roguish little head and that billowing embroidered frock--its measured décolletage sagely half-hiding, half-revealing delights which an all-Christian king had known how to value. Scarcely a sign betrayed the filth whence she came and which remained her element. She knew how to preside discreetly over a privy council. Frederick, when he wantonly repulsed her, was aiming at the female rather than at the concubine. “I do not know her,” he said: “_Je ne la connais pas._” Anybody else, in his place, would have rued that, later. Maria Theresa--foundress of the chastity commission, pious and faithful wife--displayed more self-control. “_Princesse et Cousine_,” she wrote; “_Madame ma très chère Sœur_”--it sounds scandalous, but it had to be done, for Silesia’s sake. As for Frederick’s bearing toward the Empress-queen herself, it sets in the clearest light his callousness where the sex was concerned. All the chroniclers and critics, chivalrous before everything else, speak of his behaviour as abominable.

There is a beautiful portrait drawing of the Empress-queen, by Meytens, in the copperplate collection in Berlin. There is the sumptuous rococo head, majestic and sturdy at once, proud and naïve: the pure brow, with a little diadem above it crowning the powdered hair that falls in curls upon the royal shoulders. There is the double chin, childishly dignified, the clear eyes, the powerful hooked nose, the wholesome mouth, full without being coarse. Her voice is said to have had a compelling charm. Court and people idolized her. She reigned in the fear of God, piously, patriarchally, comfortably. To her husband, Franz of Lorraine, a famous petticoat-chaser, she was a loyal wedded wife, conniving at all his shortcomings. When he died, she turned to his sobbing mistress, Princess Auersperg, and said: “My dear Princess, we have both lost much.” She was as good-natured as that. When her son, Duke Leopold of Tuscany, made her a grandmother for the first time, she was so beside herself for joy that she ran in her night-dress through the castle corridors to the Burgtheater, where there was a performance. Leaning out over the balcony of the royal box she called down into the house: “Poldy’s got a baby! And, to cap the climax, on my wedding-anniversary! Isn’t he a love?” We hear her call, we share the rapture of her audience. She was not yet four-and-twenty when her father died and bequeathed her the burden of the crown. Her health tottered beneath the defeat of Mollwitz and the ensuing crisis; for, to add to everything else, she was with child. “For all my realms were the field of battle,” she later wrote, “and I knew not where I could be brought to bed in peace.” Yet with what lofty spirit, what touching courage, she bore herself! Still weak from her lying-in, on her arm the infant whom in tears and troubles she had brought into the world, the crown of Saint Stephen on her head, she stood in Pressburg before the assembly of the Empire and summoned the chivalry of her Hungary to the defence of her insulted majesty. And the magnates--one can see them--in frenzied enthusiasm swung their crooked sabres and pressed round the throne with the cry: “We will die for our King, Maria Theresa!” But Frederick was without bowels of feeling for this majestic weakness; probably the pale maternity of his enemy only added fuel to the flames of his masculinity, and rather roused disgust than reverence. Throughout the long, inhuman struggle to which the two Silesian wars were the prelude, the thought that he was dealing with women never left him a moment. It recurs in countless of his utterances of that time; who knows if the shameful thought of being defeated by three women was not what stiffened his back? At the thanksgiving service after the victory of Mollwitz he gave out the text from I Timothy ii. 12: “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be silent.”--Maria Theresa, when she heard about it, was not a little wroth. She had a name for him, at once childish and oracular; it seems to show that her woman’s intuition pierced the secret of his character. She never named him save as “the bad man.” The bad man. Yes, that he was, with the emphasis as much on man as on bad. The mysteries of sex are very profound, never will they be quite explained. Was it that this king could not endure women because he was such a bad man, or that he was such a bad man because he could not endure women? A riddle not to be unriddled. But that the two things were somehow dependent on each other--of that I feel certain.

“The bad man”: he was that to everybody, though it was Maria Theresa who by preference and from the depths of her heart gave him the name. There was always a whispering and a plotting and a conspiring round about him--defensively, of course, in the end, and as precautionary measures--all directed against him; he had always to realize it, even when he knew nothing specific; and he parried, as well as he could, ten years long. Yes, we must agree that during all that time he was, diplomatically speaking, on the defensive against his worse nature--though one might, indeed, get the impression that even this behaviour was dictated by sheer malice and in order to lead honest people by the nose.... To sum up, the constellation of great powers was at that time as follows:

The traditional, three-hundred-year-old rivalry between France and Austria was a settled factor, a political constant, which it seemed would have to be reckoned with to all eternity. It had brought France and Prussia together and the alliance of June 1744 had still up to ’56 to run. But that alliance had become rather loose and unreliable, after Frederick withdrew--prematurely, in the view of France--from the War of the Succession. As for England, her hostility toward France was if possible even more venerable than that country’s toward Austria. France loomed large upon the continent, France had a fleet, overseas interests (there were disputes in America, more precisely in Canada)--in short, quite enough to make England keep a sharp eye on her. And George II could endure Frederick as little as anybody else. He too, though not a female, had been satirized in an epigram. And so England clave to Russia, where the amateur of strong drink and muscular soldiers sat enthroned; and did this with especial reference to Prussia; Prussia being still regarded as an ally of France, and in a position, in case of war between the latter and the English, to attack England on her continental heel of Achilles--in other words, Hanover.... The attitude of Saxon Poland was particularly curious, involved, and timid--under an Augustus anything but Strong, or, rather, under his prime minister and head of the Cabinet, Count Brühl, a great spender, a great roué and intriguer, who presently ruined the country financially and after that politically too. This man possessed two hundred pairs of shoes, eight hundred embroidered night-shirts, five hundred suits of clothes, one hundred and two watches, eight hundred and forty-three tobacco-boxes, eighty-seven rings, fifty-seven smelling-bottles, twenty-nine coaches, and fifteen hundred wigs. But I digress.--On Sweden Frederick thought he could count, his sister Ulrike being crown princess there. French influence, also, was paramount in that country--that is, it drew subsidies from France.

The intrigues, the war of pens and plottings against a greater Prussia, began, so to speak, while the ink was still wet on the signatures to the Peace of Dresden. Next to Austria, where the alienation of Silesia was regarded as entirely temporary, the chief source of the intrigues was Russia; Austria, of course, always played the rôle of diplomat with a light touch, whereas Russia, at all times clumsy, at all times ready to conspire, hammered away at the war and the annexation of East Prussia. I mentioned that Russia’s leader of foreign affairs was Bestuchev, the imperial chancellor, who took care, by arrangement with the Austrian and English agents, to feed the alcoholic hatred of his mistress for the King of Prussia, and to hold the resources of his half-savage country at the service of Austria. Scarcely any relations now subsisted between the courts of Berlin and Saint Petersburg. A sort of latent state of war obtained. Every spring, troops assembled in the Baltic Provinces and threatened to overflow the Prussian border. But there had to be some show of conducting matters in the European way; so all sorts of documents were drawn up on parchment, with secret clauses and everything proper and in order.

The fact was that as early as 1745 an alliance had been entered into by the maritime powers and the Saxon-Polish and Hungarian courts--the famous Warsaw Alliance, so-called. It had only been ratified in the spring of that year, at Leipsic, and looked harmless enough on the surface, but it had a secret clause, the Warsaw Agreement, signed only by the monarchs of Hungary and Poland, which was definitely directed against the robber of Silesia. Scarcely had the Peace of Dresden been signed, when Vienna, through the proper diplomatic channels, let it be known in Dresden that she hoped the Warsaw Agreement was still in force. Brühl would have been delighted to utter a hearty yes in reply; but that he was afraid to; began to wriggle, and through all the following years continued to wriggle, until the arrival of the catastrophe. Saxony had come off unharmed from the Peace of Dresden; contrary to her expectations, for when Frederick was fighting in Bohemia she had attacked him in the rear. But he contented himself with an indemnity--the victor of Soor and Kesselsdorf was just then behaving with great moderation, not to say magnanimity. Brühl, however, hated Frederick; at that time everything political had a strong personal coloration, and the hatred of the luxurious and effeminate minister-president toward the ascetic and industrious soldier was inborn and indestructible, it yielded nothing in violence to the Austrian brand. Brühl would have been delighted to give it free vent; but there was the outward attitude of Saxony toward the Prussian states, and there was the abominable superiority of the Prussian army. “The Warsaw Agreement,” answered Brühl: yes, it subsisted, and then again, it did not subsist. It subsisted conditionally. It subsisted on condition that it did no harm to Saxony. It subsisted on condition that Russia joined it. It was indispensable that Russia should join--if she did, then by all means. It went without saying. “_Parfaitement_,” replied Austria, and applied to Russia; and Russia barely waited to be asked, she was on the spot at once, with clumsy and unlimited zeal. In the year ’46 a defensive alliance--only defensive, of course--was arranged between Austria and Russia. It contained a secret clause, to the effect that if the King attacked either of them, he should be held to have forfeited Silesia thereby--beloved, lamented Silesia, which grew dearer and dearer to the Empress-queen, the more she saw what Frederick knew how to get out of it; Catholic Silesia, whose possession by a heretic and criminal cried to heaven. Brühl was politely invited to come in ... but Brühl still wriggled. No, no signature, no official commitment, it was too dangerous. And as they were sure of his good intentions, they let him off the signature, in God’s name. If anybody accuses Saxony of having joined an alliance against Frederick, he lies. Saxony had preserved its neutrality, Saxony had not signed. That it had done its utmost, with Austria, to stir up trouble in Saint Petersburg is another matter. It was neutral, none the less; it had not signed.

A defensive alliance, be it known, is an alliance which only begins to be in force when one or another party to it is attacked by a given other power or group of powers. But one speaks in strategy of an offensive defensive; and it would appear that something of the kind may also occur in the diplomatic sphere; indeed, if it were not for the conciliatory title, it might sometimes be very hard to distinguish a defensive alliance from its reprehensible opposite. In politics, as also in life, the name is mostly a sort of _concession au publique_, and deals only superficially with the fact it represents. An attack may be of sheer necessity; but then it is not an attack at all, it is a defence. And if an attack is advantageous to the members of the defensive alliance, why, then it becomes as good as impossible to draw the psychological line where the _casus fœderis_ ceases to be a contingency which everybody would unite in avoiding, and turns into something devoutly to be wished. Thus it becomes a question of sensibility, and has to be left to the feeling of the allies, when one of them shall and will feel itself attacked; and accordingly, to invoke the _casus fœderis_ it is only necessary to drive your opponent to do the attacking--in other words, to force him into the rôle of formal aggressor, which is scarcely very difficult, and may be, under some circumstances, very easy. Things will inevitably so shape themselves, when one of the parties to the defensive alliance is a power like the Muscovite kingdom, a power whose instinct to expand has something elemental and irresponsible about it, like the stretching and the appetite of a giant; a power which, knowing itself ultimately unconquerable, is at all times clumsily eager for the fray. Now, as for this defensive alliance between Austria and Russia, aimed at Prussia: the Empress Maria Theresa had repeatedly and solemnly renounced Silesia, and she was much too god-fearing a woman even to think of breaking the compacts of Dresden, Breslau, and Aix-la-Chapelle. But for that very reason she needed to find a way of getting back Silesia which should be morally possible; and this she secured by the alliance with Russia. For if Frederick were to attack, he would lose his right to the province. Which was now for the good Maria Theresa the _casus fœderis_--a danger or a desirability? Let us call it a tempting danger, or a troubling desire. But what Russia understood by the word “defensive” is clear from the fact that in 1753 it was formally announced in the council of state in Saint Petersburg, and made the basis of a protocol, that it would also be permissible to attack Prussia in case an ally of Russia attacked her first. A corollary perhaps rather alcoholic in origin, but it makes the question wherein a defensive alliance differs, except in name, from another, to a certain extent legitimate.

Well, and did Frederick know of these things? Oh, yes, one thing and another did come to his ears in the course of these years, if more by way of a trickle than in a steady stream. He had to put them together and make sense of them himself. The system of espionage was just then at the height of its flower, blossoming rather more luxuriantly than it does today; and Frederick was its greatest supporter, considering it to be of the highest importance to maintain spies everywhere, in all the important places. He called them his “_Kujons_” (rascals) or “_Pfaffen_” (parsons), and never could have too many of them--especially since they did not cost very much. Brühl had set up a whole office in Dresden just for deciphering the Prussian dispatches; so we may consider it in the light of a retort on Frederick’s part that he kept a “_Kujon_” there in his pay, to post him in events important for the King to know. This famous _filou_, named Menzel, a book-keeper by occupation, had access to the files which contained the secret documents of the government of Saxony, and for years made copies of the diplomatic correspondence between Russia and Vienna, which, together with the replies sent by the wriggling Brühl, he punctually dispatched to Potsdam. From these documents Frederick gleaned precisely the dealings which Saxony had with Vienna and Saint Petersburg at the beginning and toward the middle of the fifties. He learned how Brühl wriggled and twisted in order both to preserve and to betray the neutrality of Saxony; how Russia was persuaded to come in; how they egged her on, in her clumsy enthusiasm, to bring things to a point; how a god-fearing empress set to work to find a valid, an ethical excuse for action. He learned--if he had not known before--what sort of thing a defensive alliance might be, when directed against himself; and, supposing that he, on his side, was not god-fearing and peaceably disposed, not at all inclined to rest on the laurels of Hohenfriedberg, but, on the contrary, cherishing all sorts of schemes and treacheries--then, here in these very papers, he himself possessed the moral possibility which the good Empress-queen was to reap from his offensive. As you see, the real inwardness of things was somewhat complicated, though it was, on Frederick’s side, more downright, more contemptuous, less involved, than it was with Maria Theresa and the man who, as Frederick said, had fifteen hundred wigs and no head.