ONE:At Oppeln there was a bridge across the Oder by which the king hoped to escape with his regiment to the free country beyond. There he intended to summon to his aid the army of thirty-six thousand men which he had sent to G?tten under the Old Dessauer. The discharge of the musketry of the Austrians blasted even this dismal hope. It seemed as though Frederick259 were doomed to drain the cup of misery to its dregs; and his anguish must have been intensified by the consciousness that he deserved it all. But a few leagues behind him, the bleak, snow-clad plains, swept by the night-winds, were strewed with the bodies of eight or nine thousand men, the dying and the dead, innocent peasant-boys torn from their homes, whose butchery had been caused by his own selfish ambition.But, notwithstanding this wonderful victory and narrow escape, it still seemed that Fredericks destruction was only postponed for a short time. He was in the heart of Silesia, and was surrounded by hostile armies three times more numerous than his own.
ONE:General R?mer, in command of the Austrian cavalry, had crushed the right wing of the Prussians. Resolutely he followed up his victory, hotly chasing the fugitives in the wildest disorder far away to the rear, capturing nine of their guns. Who257 can imagine the scene? There were three or four thousand horsemen put to utter rout, clattering over the plain, impetuously pursued by six or seven thousand of the finest cavalry in the world, discharging pistol-shots into their flying ranks, and raining down upon them sabre-blows.In one of the letters of the Crown Prince, speaking of the mode of traveling with his father, he says: We have now been traveling near three weeks. The heat is as great as if we were riding astride upon a ray of the sun. The dust is like a dense cloud, which renders us invisible to the eyes of the by-standers. In addition to this, we travel like the angels, without sleep, and almost without food. Judge, then, what my condition must be.
ONE:Silesia was at the mercy of the foe. Frederick regarded the calamity as irreparable. Still in a few hours he recovered his equanimity, and in public manifested his accustomed stoicism. The victorious Austrian soldiers in Silesia conducted themselves like fiends. Their plunderings and outrages were too shocking to be recited. Nothing was spared by them, writes Frederick, but misery and ugliness.234 Adieu, dear Swan of Padua. Think, I pray, sometimes of those who are getting themselves cut in slices for the sake of glory here; and, above all, do not forget your friends who think a thousand times of you.
