THREE:In a pet Frederick left the room. The heroic general, who had flatly refused to obey a positive command, found it necessary to resign his commission. The next day another officer plundered the castle. Seventy-five thousand dollars of the proceeds of the sale were appropriated to the field hospitals. The remainder, which proved to be a large sum, was the reward of the plundering general.
THREE:
THREE:And, in addition to all this, the more effectually to hoodwink the eagle eyes of the French minister in the Prussian camp, M. Valori, the following stratagem was arranged. The king was to invite M. Valori to dine with him. While at the table, merry over their wine, a courier was to arrive, and with trumpet blast announce dispatches for the king. They were to be delivered to the king at the table. He was to open them before Valori, to find that they consisted of a bitter complaint and remonstrance, on the part of the British minister, that the king was inflexible in repelling all advances toward an amicable adjustment of their difficulties, that unrelentingly he persisted in co-operating with France in her warfare against Austria. All this farce took place according to the programme. M. Valori was effectually deceived.
THREE:
THREE:The sun had just risen above the horizon when the conflict commenced. It reached its meridian. Still the storm of battle swept the plains and reverberated over the hills. Heights had been taken and retaken; charges had been made and repelled; the surges of victory had rolled to and fro; over many leagues the thunderbolts of battle were thickly flying; bugle peals, cries of onset, shrieks of the wounded crushed beneath artillery wheels, blended with the rattle of musketry and the roar of artillery; riderless horses were flying in all directions; the extended plain was covered with the wreck and ruin of battle, and every moment was multiplying the victims of wars horrid butchery.
THREE:Frederick was, with great energy, gathering all his resources for a decisive conflict in his fortresses along the banks of the Neisse. By almost superhuman exertions he had collected an army there of about seventy thousand men. The united army of Austria and Saxony marching upon him amounted to one hundred thousand regulars, together with uncounted swarms of349 Pandours sweeping around him in all directions, interrupting his communications and cutting off his supplies.M. DArget, private secretary of the French minister Valori, gives an interesting account of an interview he held with Frederick at this time. M. DArget was quite a favorite of the king, who conversed with him with unusual frankness.
THREE:Now, however, Frederick, in that downward path through which the rejecters of Christianity invariably descend, had reached the point at which he renounced all belief in the immortality of the soul and in the existence of God. In a poetic epistle addressed to Marshal Keith, he declares himself a materialist, and affirms his unwavering conviction that the soul, which he says is but the result of the bodily organization, perishes with that body. He declares suicide to be the only remedy for man in his hour of extremity.
THREE:As the king cast his eye over the blood-stained field, covered with the wounded and the dead, for a moment he seemed overcome with the aspect of misery, and exclaimed, When, oh when will my woes cease?