Chapter II: Frederick the Great and the Grand Coalition (3)

To Finckenstein: “It seems unhappily that we are not yet at the end of our task. We have too many enemies to be able to gain such superiority over them as to enforce peace. All Europe is marching against us; it seems to be the fashion to be our enemy, and a title of honour to contribute to our destruction.”

To Voltaire: “You, who do not fight yourself, do not for God’s sake laugh at others; be tranquil, be happy, that you have no persecutors, and learn to be care-free and enjoy the repose you have at last attained after chasing after it for sixty years.... Are you still, at sixty, so lacking in common sense? And learn, in your old age, how you ought to write to me. Please note that certain liberties are permitted to writers and wits; but when they become impertinent it is too much.... But enough, I have forgiven all, in a truly Christian spirit. On the whole, you have given me more pleasure than pain. Your writing has more power to cheer me than your scratches to hurt.... You cry out for peace so loudly that I am fain to tell you to turn that lofty impertinence of yours, which so well becomes you, against those who are responsible for the delay in concluding peace.... Despite all your efforts, I will never sign a peace save on conditions consonant with my country’s honour. The people of your native land, puffed up as they are with folly and vanity, may rely upon it that I mean what I say.”

To Ferdinand of Brunswick: “Unless France signs a peace with England we are hopelessly lost; we have too many enemies, too many people are disheartened by our disasters, and the morale of our troops has plainly deteriorated. There is nothing left but for you to think up an inscription for my tombstone. The great calamity will not come to pass before the middle of August; but by then all will be lost beyond repair. You know that I am usually not a pessimist; but now there is no possibility of seeing anything else but black.”

To d’Argens: “The French are amusing asses. I like an enemy that makes me laugh; I hate my grumpy Austrians, swollen with impudence and pride, no good for anything except to make one yawn.”

To the same: “You value life as a sybarite, I look at death like a stoic. Never will I survive that moment in which I am forced to sign a disadvantageous peace; no eloquence, no inducement, can drive me to subscribe to my own disgrace. I have told you, and I repeat: never will I put pen to a shameful peace. I am firmly resolved to stake all upon this campaign, to perform the most desperate deeds, to conquer or find an honourable end.”

“The defence,” says Rancke, “earned him high esteem in the states of Europe. In defending himself, King Frederick became the great man of his century.”--That is true, and yet not true--in so far, that is, as it considers Frederick’s war against Europe to have been a purely defensive one. The dispute among historians as to whether it really was that--and not rather a war of aggression--waxes louder than ever today; but the situation is far too complicated, too involved, to permit of a simple and final answer. In its very last analysis this gigantic struggle was an offensive war; for the young, the rising power is always, psychologically speaking, the aggressor, and the others, the existing powers, are on the defensive against it. Somewhat more superficially speaking, it was a defensive war, for Prussia was actually “encircled” and was to be destroyed with all possible speed. Then it was, again, an offensive war in that Frederick obligingly picked the quarrel. Yet, once more, it was a war of defence, for when the odds are one to five, that is tantamount to defence, even though it was the one who actually declared war against the five--or, rather, as a matter of fact, failed to declare it. And, fifthly, it was an offensive war: on the ground that the most desperate and difficult defence must always needs save itself by attacking. “Attack, attack! Keep on their heels! _Attaquez donc toujours!_” To that tune, instinctively, he had always disciplined his troops, he had even made it instinctive with them; and to it he carried on war, unmindful of the voices of those who urged him to keep on the defensive--in situations like that of the year 1759, when the Russians were on his left, and Daun on his right, and Sweden in his rear.

What friends he had were not worthy of the name. England regarded him as her soldier against France, she was satisfied to have him hold France in check in Europe while she quietly annexed the French colonies in the New World; but, in the interests of business, she refused to relieve him in the Baltic, against Russia; she paid subsidies as long as it pleased her, and when it pleased her no longer she left off. As we know, the war lasted seven years--seven is always the number of years the princes and the miller’s sons have to serve in the fairy-tale; but it was a seven years’ test a little severer than ever falls to their lot; it was, without exaggeration, the severest test ever a human soul has had to stand upon this earth. To stand it required such passive and active qualities, such a measure of endurance and patience, of inventive and resourceful energy, as neither before nor since, to my knowledge, a man has ever displayed or had occasion to display. Seven years long did King Frederick march hither and yon, fighting, beating here one enemy and there another, being beaten himself too, sometimes almost destroyed; staggering erect again because he thought of something else which might still be tried; trying it, with incredible, improbable success and coming safe off once more. Always in his shabby uniform, booted and spurred, with his uniform hat on his head, breathing, year in, year out, the dust of his own troops, in an atmosphere of sweat, leather, blood, and powder smoke, he would walk up and down in his tent, between two battles, a dismal defeat and an incredible victory, and play on his flute, or scribble French verses, or write quarrelsome letters to Voltaire. His mother died, without his even seeing her; he felt now more forsaken than ever. His favourite sister died--“_mon Dieu, ma sœur de Bayreuth!_”--and his anguish at the loss testifies to the tenderness of his iniquitous heart. In time he himself became grotesque; he was not unconscious of the frightful comicality of his existence, he compared himself with Don Quixote, with the Wandering Jew. “The ox must plough the furrow,” he would say, “the nightingale must sing, the dolphin swim, and I--I must make war.” He imagined himself condemned to carry on war up to the day of judgment; he became a spectre to himself. The dreadful weariness of spectres he knew, their pathetic yearning for rest. “The happy dead! They are saved from all cares and troubles.” He kept poison always upon him for the last emergency; but though the last emergency seemed many times to have arrived, he did not take it, for always some other plan occurred to him, and the emergency passed. Beneath the frightful punishment, the cruel vicissitudes, the ceaseless tension, “the nicest little creature in the kingdom” aged rapidly. He lost his teeth, his hair went white on one side, his back got bent, his figure leaner and leaner, he suffered from gout. And besides that, from diarrhœa. It was, in fact, the tortures of the damned he suffered. But his fame grew apace--his transgression, his breach of the rights of nations were forgotten, but his fame as of the chosen of God grew and spread like a tree and overshadowed the century. It was not alone that he routed the hosts of Marshal Soubise at Rossbach--that same Marshal Soubise who stole Alsace and set fire to the Palatinate--and became a hero to all Germany, a symbol round which their torn loyalties might once more twine. His deeds, and his sufferings, won him the sympathies of the people of all nations. Yes, his defeats not less than his victories occupied near and far the hearts of men, and the grotesque, the Quixotic flavour, in his personality helped magnify him in the popular eye and elevate him to a legendary fame: his picture, with the wry mouth, the sparkling blue eyes, the three-cornered hat, the cane, the star, the shoulder-cord--it hung in cottage and hall; while he still lived he was a hero of legend. From now on he was called _der alte Fritz_: an awe-inspiring name, to anybody with a sense of awe; for it is really in the highest degree awe-inspiring to find the dæmon become a household word and given a nickname.

He had outlived the hate, the psychic resistance, of the world; and thereby had withdrawn an indispensable prop from the morale of his foes. The rest was done by his radicalism, his readiness to go all lengths, the depth of his resolution, which seemed to his opponents at once so offensive and so frightful, like a strange and savage dog--in the end they all shuddered before him. His moral advantage was that it was always, with him, a matter of life and death, and that gave him a sense of absolute values of which the others knew nothing. I will not speak of his genius as a strategist, being a layman in that field. And I wish not to speak of his “luck”; for it is always stupid to distinguish luck from a man’s other merits and count it as undeserved, instead of part of all the rest. Still, if you like, he was lucky. He was on the brink of destruction when Elizabeth of Russia surrendered to her love-affairs and left a poor simpleton named Peter to reign, said Peter admiring Frederick to the point of idolatry, so that he struck a peace with him at once. But the King had to win a few more battles before the others saw at last that it was hopeless, and retired from the field tired out. He went back home.

He had won nothing tangible, and his territories were ravaged, depopulated, impoverished, run wild. But Prussia endured, not a village lost; Silesia was safe, and the end and aim of the Great Coalition a total failure. It was a deep humiliation for the continent at the hands of a single man. The verdict of destiny, all the probabilities to the contrary, had been rendered in his favour; it was impossible to dispute it in the long run. They had to make way for Prussia, for Germany, to follow its own path--a path which has since proved as steep and fateful, as full of manifold and instructive turns of fortune, as any path a people ever trod.

As for him, his later course, which continued yet for a long time, was dreary, and chilly, and unlovely. After that frightful seven years his nature had grown more sardonic than ever before. He had fought and suffered beyond the capacity of ordinary men; and to him they now all seemed like a childish breed, an undistinguishable rabble. It is incomprehensible why he should have gone on wearing himself out in labour for this breed even while he choked with scorn of it. He poured himself into the task of making good the harm that he had done, of healing the ravaged fields and patching the tattered finances, of summoning whole industries into existence, of adding a whole province to his kingdom and rescuing it from neglect by a magnificent system of colonization. And all this would be incomprehensible unless one thinks of his sense of duty as a sort of possession and of him as the tool of a higher will. His industry was a cold and joyless passion. He was burnt out, he was dry and withered and wicked, he loved nobody, and nobody loved him; his royal existence was a burden, and no honourable one, to the rest of the world. And when he needed a little animal warmth, he was fain to share his bed with his favourite greyhound. He kept a great many dogs, and it was his wish to be buried near them. When the last one of these died he wept all day long. He still found a little pleasure in embroiling his philosophers among themselves; then he sent them all away. For whereas earlier in his life he had only mocked at religion, now he mocked at philosophy as well; saying that a good digestion was more important than knowledge of the essence of things. And he had a very bad digestion, it was spoilt by the highly spiced dishes he insisted on eating. When at last he died, at seventy-four, after a tormenting and repulsive illness, everything, we are told, was deathly still, but no one mourned. There was not a single clean, whole shirt in his wardrobe, and his valet gave one of his to clothe the corpse--which was tiny as a child’s.

One is prone to think of him as a sort of hobgoblin, an object of hatred and detestation, leading the whole world into a quagmire, a spiteful, sexless troll, for the destruction of whom a hundred million men toiled to exhaustion in vain, since he was created and sent to bring about great and inevitable events upon this earth. Then, after the performance of them, he vanished, leaving behind him a husk like a little child’s.

The riddle of his existence lay in the dualism which Jean Jacques Rousseau reduced to a formula: “_Il pense en philosophe et se conduit en roi._” That is a great antithesis, and comprises many and many a pair of active opposites: for instance, right and might, thought and action, freedom and destiny, reason and dæmon, bourgeois morality and heroic necessity. Such opposites, united in one flesh and blood and become a strife of instincts, naturally do not make for a comfortable, logical, and harmonious existence. There is a resulting irony on both sides, a radical scepticism, a fanatic zeal for achievement at bottom quite nihilistic, a sense of power as melancholy as it is evil. Frederick wrote the _Antimachiavelli_, and that was not hypocrisy, but literature. He loved the humane spirit, reason, dry clarity of atmosphere--loved them by contraries and out of the depth of his being, which was essentially dæmonic, essentially a slave to the destiny which made him its instrument. Thus he loved Voltaire, the son of the spirit, the father of enlightenment and of all anti-heroic civilization. He kissed the lean hand that wrote: “I hate all heroes”; and he himself mocked his seven years’ struggle with the words: “heroic weakness.” But he set it down in black and white that if he wanted to visit a province with the severest punishment, he would sentence it to be governed by writers; his enlightenment was so skin-deep that he believed himself bullet-proof; and when he wants to explain why he preferred the frightful strain and bloody horrors of war to the tranquil repose of a literary life, he speaks largely of a “secret instinct.” What he means was stronger in him than literature; it guided his acts, conditioned his life; and it is certainly a most German thought to think that this secret instinct, this element of the dæmonic and super-personal in him, was: the urge of destiny, the spirit of history.

He was a sacrifice. He felt, indeed, that he had sacrificed himself: his youth to his father, his manhood to the State. But he erred if he believed that a choice was open to him. He was a sacrifice. He had to do wrong, he had to lead a life contrary to his thoughts, he had to be not a philosopher but a king, in order that the destiny of a great people might be fulfilled.

1914