With Frederick the Great: A Story of the Seven Years' War

by G. A. Henty

The Prussian engineers, who did not shine at siege work, opened their trenches eight hundred yards too far away. The magazines were too far off, and Daun, who as usual carefully abstained from giving battle, so cut up the convoys that, after five weeks of vain endeavours, the king was obliged to raise the siege; partly owing to the loss of the convoy that would have enabled him to take the town, which was now at its last extremity; and partly that he knew that the Russians were marching against Brandenburg.

He made a masterly retreat, struck a heavy blow at Daun by capturing and destroying his principal magazine, and then took up a very strong position near Koeniggraetz. Here he could have maintained himself against all Daun's assaults, for his position was one that Daun had himself held and strongly fortified; but the news from the north was of so terrible a nature that he was forced to hurry thither.

The Cossacks, as the Russian army advanced, were committing most horrible atrocities; burning towns and villages, tossing men and women into the fire, plundering and murdering everywhere; and the very small Prussian force that was watching them was powerless to check the swarming marauders.

Frederick therefore, evading Daun's attempts to arrest his march, crossed the mountains into Silesia again. At Landshut he gave his army two days' rest; wrote and sent a paper to his brother Prince Henry, who was commander of the army defending Saxony from invasion, telling him that he was on the point of marching against the Russians and might well be killed; and giving him orders as to the course to be pursued, in such an event.

He left Keith, in command of forty thousand men, to hold Daun in check should the latter advance against Silesia; and he again took Fergus with him, finding the young officer's talk a pleasant means of taking his mind off the troubles that beset him.

In nine days the army, which was but fifteen thousand strong, marched from Landshut to Frankfort-on-Oder. Here the king learned that though Kuestrin, which the Russians were besieging, still held out, the town had been barbarously destroyed by the enemy.

In fierce anger the army pressed forward. The Russian army itself, officers and men, were indignant in the extreme at the brutalities committed by the Cossacks, but were powerless to restrain them; for indeed these ruffians did not hesitate to attack and kill any officer who ventured to interfere between them and their victims.

The next morning, early, Frederick reached the camp of his general Dohna; who had been watching, although unable to interfere with the Russians' proceedings. The king had a profound contempt for the Russians, in spite of the warning of Keith, who had served with them, that they were far better soldiers than they appeared to be; and he anticipated a very easy victory over them.

Early on the 22nd of August the army from Frankfort arrived. Dohna's strength was numerically about the same as the king's, and with his thirty thousand men Frederick had no doubt that he would make but short work of the eighty thousand Russians, of whom some twenty-seven thousand were the Cossack rabble, who were not worth being considered, in a pitched battle. Deceiving the Russians as to his intentions by opening a heavy cannonade on one of their redoubts, as if intending to ford the river there, he crossed that evening twelve miles lower down and, after some manoeuvring, faced the Russians, who had at once broken up the siege on hearing of his passage.

Fermor sent away his baggage train to a small village called Kleinkalmin, and planted himself on a moor, where his front was covered by quagmires and the Zaborn stream. Hearing, late at night on the evening of the 24th, that Frederick was likely to be upon them the next morning, the Russian general drew out into the open ground north of Zorndorf, which stands on a bare rise surrounded by woods and quagmires, and formed his army into a great square, two miles long by one broad, with his baggage in the middle--a formation which had been found excellent by the Russians in their Turkish wars, but which was by no means well adapted to meet Frederick's methods of impetuous attack. Being ignorant as to the side upon which Frederick was likely to attack, and having decided to stand on the defensive, he adopted the methods most familiar to him.