"I like him, too. I have observed that he is always lively and cheery, even at the end of the longest day's work. I notice too that, even though your relation, he never becomes too familiar; and his talk will be refreshing, when I want something to distract my thoughts from weighty matters."
So Fergus went with the king, who could ill afford to lose Keith from his side. With none was he more friendly and intimate and, now that Schwerin had gone, he relied upon him more implicitly than upon any other of his officers.
But Keith had been, for some time, unwell. He was suffering from asthma and other ailments that rendered rapid travel painful to him; and he would obtain more rest and ease, in Bohemia, than he could find in the rapid journey the king intended to make.
On the fifth day of his march Frederick heard, to his stupefaction, that Schweidnitz had surrendered. The place was an extremely strong one, and the king had relied confidently upon its holding out for two or three months. Its fortifications were constructed in the best manner; it was abundantly supplied with cannon, ammunition, and provisions; and its surrender was inexcusable.
The fault was doubtless, to a large degree, that of its commandant, who was a man of no resolution or resources; but it was also partly due to the fact that a portion of the garrison were Saxons, who had at Pirna been obliged to enter the Prussian service. Great numbers of these deserted; a hundred and eighty of them, in one day, going over from an advanced post to the enemy. With troops like these, there could be no assurance that any post would be firmly held--a fact that might well shake the confidence of any commander in his power of resistance.
The blow was none the less severe, to Frederick, from being partly the result of his own mistaken step of enrolling men bitterly hostile in the ranks of the army. Still, disastrous as the news was, it did not alter his resolution; and at even greater speed than before he continued his march. Sometimes of an evening he sent for Fergus, and chatted with him pleasantly for an hour or two, asking him many questions of his life in Scotland, and discoursing familiarly on such matters, but never making any allusion to military affairs.
On the tenth day of the march they arrived at Gorlitz, where another piece of bad news reached Frederick. Prince Karl, after taking Schweidnitz, had fallen with sixty thousand men on Bevern. He had crossed by five bridges across the Loe, but each column was met by a Prussian force strongly intrenched. For the space of fifteen hours the battles had raged, over seven or eight miles of country. Five times the Austrians had attacked, five times had they been rolled back again; but at nine o'clock at night they were successful, more or less, in four of their attacks, while the Prussian left wing, under the command of Ziethen, had driven its assailants across the river again.
During the night Bevern had drawn off, marched through Breslau, and crossed the Oder, leaving eighty cannon and eight thousand killed and wounded--a tremendous loss, indeed, when the army at daybreak had been thirty thousand strong. Bevern himself rode out to reconnoitre, in the gray light of the morning, attended only by a groom, and fell in with an Austrian outpost. He was carried to Vienna, but being a distant relation of the emperor, was sent home again without ransom.
It was the opinion of Frederick that he had given himself up intentionally, and on his return he was ordered at once to take up his former official post at Stettin; where he conducted himself so well, in the struggle against the Russian armies, that two years later he was restored to Frederick's favour.
As if this misfortune was not great enough, two days later came the news that Breslau had surrendered without firing a shot; and this when it was known that the king was within two days' march, and pressing forward to its relief. Here ninety-eight guns and an immense store and magazine were lost to Prussia.