TWO:Frederick angrily replied, You can have no instructions to ask that question. And if you had, I have an answer ready for you. England has no right to inquire into my designs. Your great sea armaments, did I ask you any question about them? No! I was, and am, silent on that head.40196
TWO:Wilhelmina, in her distress in view of the peril of her brother, wrote to Voltaire, hoping that he might be persuaded to exert an influence in his favor.I drove the enemy to the gates of Dresden. They occupy515 their camp of last year. All my skill is not enough to dislodge them. We have saved our reputation by the day of Torgau. But do not imagine that our enemies are so disheartened as to desire peace. I fear that the French will preserve through the winter the advantages they have gained during the campaign.
TWO:The salvation of the army seemed to depend upon capturing the Austrian magazines at Beneschau. Marshal Schwerin was sent forward with all speed, at the head of a strong detachment, and was so lucky as to take Beneschau. Here he intrenched himself. Frederick, upon hearing the glad tidings, immediately started from Tabor to join him. His sick were at Fraunberg, Budweis, and Neuhaus, some dozen miles south of Tabor. Garrisons, amounting to three thousand men, had been left to protect them from the Pandours. As Frederick was about to abandon that whole region, it was manifest that these garrisons could not maintain themselves. He dispatched eight messengers in succession to summon the troops immediately to join him. The sick were to be left to their fate. It was one of the cruel necessities of war. But not one of these messengers escaped capture by the Pandours. Frederick commenced his march without these garrisons. The three thousand fighting men, with the three hundred sick, all fell into the hands of the Pandours.Through the efforts of Maria Theresa there was another brief conference, but it amounted to nothing. Neither party wished for war. But Austria craved the annexation of Bavaria, and Frederick was determined that Austria should not thus be enlarged.557 Thus the summer passed away in unavailing diplomacy and in equally unavailing military man?uvrings. While engaged in these adventures, Frederick received the tidings of the death of Voltaire, who breathed his last on the 20th of May, 1778. The soul of Frederick was too much seared by lifes stern conflicts to allow him to manifest, or probably to feel, any emotion on the occasion. He, however, wrote a eulogy upon the renowned littrateur, which, though written by a royal pen, attracted but little attention.
TWO:The young prince had also become dissolute in life. The sacred110 volume denounced such a career as offensive to God, as sure to bring down upon the guilty prince the divine displeasure in this life, and, if unrepented of, in the life to come. No man who believes the Bible to be true can, with any comfort whatever, indulge in sin. The prince wished to indulge his passions without restraint. He therefore, thus living, found it to be a necessity to renounce that religion which arrayed against his sinful life all the terrors of the final judgment. A wicked life and true Christian faith can not live in peace together. The one or the other must be abandoned. Frederick chose to abandon Christian faith.War has its jokes and merriment, but the comedies of war are often more dreadful than the tragedies of peace. Frederick, in his works, records the following incident, which he narrates as slight pleasantry, to relieve the readers mind:83