ONE:I embraced the Princess Royal, Wilhelmina continues, and gave her every assurance of my attachment. But she remained like a statue, not answering a word. Her people not being come, I arranged her hair and readjusted her dress a little, without the least sign of thanks or any answer to all my caressings. My brother got impatient at last, and said aloud,When your highness gets armies of your own, you will order them according to your mind. At present, it must be according to mine.
TWO:
ONE:
TWO:It is not strange that Frederick, being destitute of religious principle, should have ever contemplated suicide as his last resort. On the 2d of November the king came in sight of the encampment of General Daun at Torgau, on the Elbe, some score of leagues north of Dresden. The king was at the head of forty-four thousand troops. Marshal Daun had eighty thousand, strongly intrenched upon heights west of the city, in the midst of a labyrinth of ponds, hills, ravines, and forests. We shall not attempt to enter into a detail of the battle. The following plan of the battle will give the military reader an idea of the disposal of the forces.
ONE:In October, 1723, when the prince was eleven years of age, his grandfather, George I., came to Berlin to visit his daughter and his son-in-law, the mother and father of Fritz. From the windows of his apartment he looked out with much interest upon Fritz, drilling his cadet company upon the esplanade in front of the palace. The clock-work precision of the movements of the boy soldiers greatly surprised him.
TWO:The king then hastened on to Schweidnitz, a few miles west from Breslau. This was a small town, strongly fortified, about equally distant from the three beleaguered fortressesNeisse, Brieg, and Glogau. The young monarch was daily becoming more aware that he had embarked in an enterprise which threatened him with fearful peril. He had not only failed to secure a single ally, but there were indications that England and other powers were in secret deliberation to join against him. He soon learned that England had sent a gift or loan of a million of dollarsa large sum in those daysto replenish the exhausted treasury of Maria Theresa. His minister in Russia also transmitted to him an appalling rumor that a project was in contemplation by the King of England, the King of Poland, Anne, regent of Russia, and Maria Theresa, to unite, and so partition the Prussian kingdom as to render the ambitious Frederick powerless to disturb the peace of Europe. The general motives which239 influenced the great monarchies in the stupendous war which was soon evolved are sufficiently manifest. But these motives led to a complication of intrigues which it would be alike tedious and unprofitable to attempt to unravel.There was no credit by trading people even for the necessaries of life. There was no police in the towns. To habits of equity and order there had succeeded a vile greed of gain and an anarchic disorder. The silence of the laws had produced in the people a taste for license. Boundless appetite for gain was their main rule of action. The noble, the merchant, the farmer, the laborer, raising emulously each the price of his commodity, seemed to endeavor only for their mutual ruin. Such, when the war ended, was the fatal spectacle over these provinces, which had once been so flourishing. However pathetic the description may be, it will never approach the touching and sorrowful impression which the sight of it produced.
