ONE:The latter part of April Prince Charles had gathered a large force of Austrian regulars at Olmütz, with the manifest intention of again invading Silesia. The King of Poland had entered into cordial alliance with Austria, and was sending a large army of Saxon troops to co-operate in the enterprise. Fredericks indignation was great, and his peril still greater. Encamped in the valley of the Neisse, assailed on every side, and menaced with still more formidable foes, he dispatched orders to the Old Dessauer immediately to establish an army of observation (thirty thousand strong) upon the frontiers of Saxony. He was to be prepared instantly, upon the Saxon troops leaving Saxony, to ravage the country with the most merciless plunderings of war.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.
THREE:We seldom hear from Frederick any recognition of God. But on this occasion, perhaps out of regard to the feelings of his subjects, he ordered the Te Deum to be sung in the churches of Berlin for the deliverance of Silesia from invasion.
THREE:Frederick was rapidly awaking to the consciousness that Maria Theresa, whom he had despised as a woman, and a young wife and mother, and whose territory he thought he could dismember with impunity, was fully his equal, not only in ability to raise and direct armies, but also in diplomatic intrigue. About the middle of August he perceived from his camp in Chlum that Prince Charles was receiving large re-enforcements from the south. At the same time, he saw that corps after corps, principally of Saxon troops, were defiling away by circuitous roads to the north. It was soon evident that the heroic Maria Theresa was preparing to send an army into the very heart of Prussia to attack its capital. This was, indeed, changing the aspect of the war.CHARGE OF GENERAL SEIDLITZ AT ZORNDORF.