The other trait I have to give you is this. On the 15th of February last, the day of concluding this peace, which is so glorious to him, some one said to him, It is the finest day of your majestys life. The king replied,
ONE:In fine, my dear marquis, the job ahead of me is hard and difficult, and nobody can say positively how it will all go. Pray for us; and dont forget a poor devil who kicks about strangely in his harness, who leads the life of one damned.
TWO:FREDERICK WILLIAM ENRAGED.
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ONE:No man of kindly sympathies could have thus wantonly wounded the feelings of a poor old man who had, according to his capacity, served himself, his father, and his grandfather, and who was just dropping into the grave. A generous heart would have forgotten the foibles, and, remembering only the virtues, would have spoken words of cheer to the world-weary heart, seeking a sad refuge in the glooms of the cloister. It must be confessed that Frederick often manifested one of the worst traits in human nature. He took pleasure in inflicting pain upon others.
TWO:
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ONE:To whose continual sluggishness and strange want of concertto whose incoherency of movements, languor of execution, and other enormous faults, we have owed, with some excuse for our own faults, our escape from destruction hitherto.
TWO:On the 18th of December a strong Austrian army entered Silesia and took possession of the country of Glatz. The Prussian troops were withdrawn in good order to their strong fortresses on the Oder. The old Prince Leopold, the cast-iron man, called the Old Dessauer, the most inflexible of mortals, was left in command of the Prussian troops. He was, however, quite seriously alienated from Frederick. A veteran soldier, having spent his lifetime on fields of blood, and having served the monarchs of Prussia when Frederick was but a child, and who had been the military instructor of the young prince, he deemed himself entitled to consideration which an inexperienced officer might not command. In one of the marches to which we have referred, Leopold ventured to take a route different from that which Frederick had prescribed to him. In the following terms the Prussian king reprimanded him for his disobedience:
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TWO:The next day, the 21st of August, he wrote to DArgens to come and visit him, and bring his bed with him. I will have you a little chamber ready. But the next day he wrote,
FORE:The king was not a little vain of the keen thrusts he could occasionally give the clergy. In a letter to Marie-Antoine, Electress of Saxony, dated Potsdam, May 3, 1768, he, with much apparent complacency, records the following witty achievement:
FORE:No, the prince replied; but if the king absolutely will have it, I will marry to obey him. After that I will shove my wife into a corner, and live after my own fancy.
FORE:The whole suburb seemed on a blaze. Nay, you would have said the whole town was environed in flames. I will not describe to your lordship the horror, the terror, the confusion of this night; the wretched inhabitants running with their furniture toward the great garden. All Dresden, in appearance, girt with flames, ruin, and smoke.
FORE: Commencement of the Sixth Campaign.The Fortified Camp at Bunzelwitz.Skillful Engineering.Unintermitted Toil of the Soldiers.Retreat of the Russians.Loss of Schweidnitz.Peculiar Treatment of General Zastrow.Close of the Sixth Campaign.The King at Breslau.Desponding Letter to DArgens.Death of Elizabeth of Russia.Accession of Peter III.His Marriage with the Daughter of a Prussian General.Takes the Baptismal Name of Catharine.Assassination of Peter III.Curious Proclamation by the Empress.Commencement of the Seventh Campaign.Alliance of Russia with Prussia.Withdrawal from the Alliance.Termination of the War.When the king, after the Seven Years War, now and then in carnival season dined with the queen in her apartments, he usually said not a word to her. He merely, on entering, on sitting down at table, and leaving it, made the customary bows, and sat opposite to her. Once the queen was ill of gout. The table was in her apartments, but she was not there. She sat in an easy-chair in the drawing-room. On this occasion the king stepped up to the queen and inquired about her health. The circumstance occasioned among the company present, and all over the town, as the news spread, great wonder and sympathy. This is probably the last time he ever spoke to her.193
FORE:
FORE:About seven oclock in the morning the king ascended an eminence, and carefully scanned the field, where sixty thousand men were facing each other, soon to engage in mutual slaughter. There were two spectacles which arrested his attention. The one was the pomp, and pageantry, and panoply of war, with its serried ranks, its prancing steeds, its flashing armor, its waving banners, its inspiriting bugle-pealsa scene in itself beautiful and sublime in the highest conceivable degree.
FORE:The queen, looking reproachfully at Grumkow, remarked, I know full well to whom I owe all this. She then excused herself, saying that she was not well, and retired to her apartment. There she communicated to the anxious Wilhelmina the cruel message of the king. Sophie Dorothee then wrote a very earnest letter to Queen Caroline, the wife of George II., imploring that all obstacles in the way of the marriage of Wilhelmina with the Prince of Wales might be withdrawn. The idea of marriage with either Weissenfels or Schwedt was dreadful. But, on the other hand, the wrath of the king, the divorce of the queen, and75 the imprisonment of both mother and daughter in the chateau of Oranienburg, were also dreadful. Fritz was taken into the councils of his mother and sister. It was decided that he should also write to his aunt, urging his suit for the Princess Amelia. It is true that George II. was ready to accede to this marriage, but Frederick William threw obstacles in the way. It was probably the hope of Fritz to secure Amelia, notwithstanding his fathers opposition. The ready pen of Wilhelmina was employed to draft the letter, which her brother submissively copied. As it was not probable, in the intricacies in which the question was now involved, that both marriages could take place together, Fritz wrote pleading for the marriage of Wilhelmina at once, pledging his word that he would remain faithful to the Princess Amelia.
FORE:General Fermor availed himself of the darkness in withdrawing his troops, now numbering but 28,000, a mile west from the battle-field to a dense forest of firs, called Drewitz Heath. Frederick arranged his little remaining band of but eighteen thousand men in two lines, facing the foe. The next morning, Saturday, the 26th, General Fermor sent a request for a truce of three days to bury the dead. The reply was, Your proposal is entirely inadmissible. The victor will bury the slain. There was no serious resumption of the conflict on that day. Both parties were alike exhausted, and had alike expended nearly all their ammunition. Fredericks hussars had, however, found out the position of the Russian baggage train, and had effectually plundered a large portion of it.By no means, the king replied. With men like these I shall be sure of victory to-day!114
TWO:Here Frederick, with the remainder of the army from Leitmeritz, joined his brother, against whom he was greatly incensed, attributing the disasters he had encountered to his incapacity. At four oclock of the 30th of July the king met the Prince of Prussia and the other generals of the discomfited army. Both parties approached the designated spot on horseback. The king, who was accompanied by his suite, upon his arrival within about two hundred feet of the place where his brother, with his officers, was awaiting him, without saluting the prince or recognizing him in the slightest degree, dismounted, and threw himself in a reclining posture upon the greensward. General Goltz was then sent with the following message to the prince:The young sovereign commenced his reign with the utterance of very noble sentiments. The day after his accession he assembled the chief officers of his father to administer to them the oath of allegiance. He urged them to be humane in the exercise of all authority which might be delegated to them.
The slow fever, he wrote, which consumes me, has not thrown any disorder into my understanding. Condescend to listen to me, sire, now that I can not be suspected of any illusion or deceit. There is an end to the house of Prussia if you continue to brave all Europe confederated against you. You force all Europe to arm to repel your encroachments. The princes of Europe are leagued against your majesty by justice and by interest. Their subjects regard your ruin as essential to the re-establishment of peace and the safety of monarchical government. They read in your success the slavery of the human race, the annihilation of laws, the degradation of society.Take, then, she exclaimed, the Grand Turk or the Great Mogul for your husband. Follow your own caprice. Had I known you better I would not have brought so many sorrows upon myself. You may follow the kings bidding. It is henceforth your own affair. I will no longer trouble myself about your concerns. And spare me, if you please, the sorrows of your odious presence. I can not stand it.The tidings of the death of the kings mother reached him on the 2d of July, 1757. Sir Andrew Mitchell, the English embassador in Berlin, gives the following account of an interview he had with Frederick on that occasion:It was a glorious victory. What was the price? Five thousand six hundred Prussian young men lay in their blood upon the field, dead or wounded. Six thousand seven hundred young men from Austrian homes lay by their side, silent in death, or groaning in anguish, lacerated by the missiles of war.At the bridges Frederick found but three thousand men of his late army. The huts around were filled with the wounded and the dying, presenting an aspect of misery which, in these hours of terrible defeat, appalled his majesty. In one of these huts, surrounded by mutilated bodies, groans, and death, Frederick wrote the following dispatch to his minister (Finckenstein) at Berlin. It was dated Oetscher, August 12, 1759:
TWO:
